
Class j)ij_ 
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LIFE AND HISTORY 

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 



LIFE AND HISTORY 



BY 

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 

AUTHOR OF "productive BELIEFS," *'tHE EYES OF FAITH,' 
**THE aUEST FOR WONDER," ETC. 




NEW >iSJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 

JUL 24 "22 

©CI.A681048 



TO MY FRIEND 
CARL A. FEI.T 



A WORD TO THE READER 

The papers which make up this volume were 
all written during the progress or since the con- 
clusion of the World War. The first and the 
second come out of the busy days of academic 
activity before America entered the war. The 
discussion "The University and the Remaking 
of the World" was given in substance in the 
chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford, a little be- 
fore the signing of the Armistice. "The Uni- 
versity and the Republic" was the Baccalaureate 
address at Northwestern University in Nineteen 
Twenty and attempts to appraise the intellec- 
tual situation in America at the close of the war. 
"Finding a Permanent Passion" was delivered 
at Sage Chapel, Cornell University, and at- 
tempts to find sources of permanent idealism in 
a period of reaction. "The Place of Religion in 
the New Era" was deHvered in the City Tem- 
ple in London the year after the war closed. 
"America's Debt to England" was contributed 
to the Fourth of July number of the London 

[vii] 



A WORD TO THE READER 

Times in Nineteen Twenty. The other papers 
all have their place in expressing the point of 
view of a man busy with books and men and the 
attempt to appraise and understand the forces 
of contemporary life. Certain omissions which 
will be obvious to the trained and observant 
reader have to do with movements regarding 
which I have not felt ready as yet to speak. 

If a phrase is needed to describe the general 
position taken, perhaps one may find it in the 
words Evangelical Humanism. The author 
would like to believe that in some measure 
Athens and Jerusalem meet in friendly fashion 
in his own mind and in what he writes. 

My thanks are due to the publishers of The 
Methodist Review for permission to use material 
which has appeared in that periodical. 

L. H. H. 



[viii] 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 
I THE APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY . IS 

II THE RELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND IN- 
TERPRETATION 40 

III THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC . . 59 

IV THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REMAKING OF THE 

WORLD 82 

V THE PREACHER AND THE FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 98 

VI MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE . . . . ,121 

VII DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 140 

VIII THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN . . , l64 

IX America's debt to England . . . .173 

X THE PREACHER AS A READER OF GENERAL LIT- 
ERATURE 180 

XI FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION . . . 197 

XII THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA . 211 



[ix] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 



LIFE AND HISTORY 



THE APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH 
HISTORY * 

THE past is the true university. Scholarship 
has as its basis the knowledge of history. 
The man of learning is the man who knows the 
past. The man of erudition is the man who is 
familiar with the past. The man who **sees life 
steadily and sees it whole" is the man who sees 
the present as interpreted by the past. This 
great university of the past has as many depart- 
ments as there have been avenues of human 
thought and activity. It can paraphrase the 
words of the poet Terence and put upon its seal, 
"All that has concerned humanity is of interest 
to me." It is the sworn foe of provincialism. It 
is the creator of a cosmopolitan spirit. Its doc- 

* Inaugural address of the author as Professor of Historical 
Theology in Garrett Biblical Institute. 

[13] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

tors are men whose interests are as large as the 
ranges of human life. In the old myth Athena 
leaped fuU grown from the brain of Zeus. She 
had no past. She had only a great, luminous, 
puissant present. All this may have been prac- 
ticable for Athena, but it is not feasible for the 
man of to-day. The apostle of a bustling, pro- 
vincial, ignorant efficiency, who calls himself a 
success because he knows how to keep belts on 
wheels and to keep in motion the throbbing ma- 
chinery of modern industrial life, is very often a 
man of pitiably small mental horizon, of a nar- 
row range of interests, of a singular poverty of 
ideas. He has learned how to acquire money. 
He does not know how to enjoy or use it in any 
large or generous or adequate way. He is a sort 
of expert bookkeeper who keeps life's credits 
larger than its debits. He is on the point of per- 
ishing of an anaemic condition of personality just 
when his stocks and bonds are most completely 
under his control. To his shrewd knowledge of 
affairs, if he is ever to learn the difference be- 
tween manipulating securities and actually liv- 
ing, this man must add the range of interests 
coming from a thousand varied contacts with the 
great matters of human experience. He needs 
[14] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

to enter the university of the past. Edmund 
Clarence Stedman, the Wall Street poet and 
critic, is a noble illustration of the fashion in 
which this may be accomplished. History makes 
a man's ancestors his contemporaries. He is as 
old as the experience by which he is willing to 
profit while he remains as young as the new en- 
terprises on which he is wilHng to embark. What 
the quickly moving express does, in a measure, 
with regard to space, history actually accom- 
plishes as regards time. The dweller in one age 
becomes a citizen of the ages. All their deep, 
vital meaning is offered for the enrichment of his 
own life. 

Of course the past may be a liability as well 
as an asset. When John Locke went to Oxford 
University he found the scholastic method in full 
power. If he had surrendered to its assumptions 
he would have become a clever exponent of an 
outworn system. His life would have been spent 
in the feats of a mental acrobat instead of in the 
achievements of constructive thought. The cour- 
age to break with the dead past was the basis of 
all his positive work. This thing has happened 
again and again in the history of thought. Every 
mental approach and process of investigation 

[15] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

tends to harden into a scholasticism of its own 
type. That which was once full of freshness and 
creative energy becomes by a curious transforma- 
tion a mass of intellectual chains. The ability to 
distinguish between the dead past and the living 
past is of cardinal importance to the man who 
would keep his thought fertile and potent. Then 
there are some things coming out of the past 
which have a malignant vitality. No man with 
any gift of spiritual imagination can view the 
great Pope Hildebrand's dream of a church su- 
preme over the states of the world without feel- 
ing the splendor of the conception, but that very 
conception has wrought untold havoc in the ec- 
clesiastical life of Christendom. The genuine in- 
terests of morals and religion have been sacri- 
ficed to that dream. Power has been felt to be 
more important than moral and spiritual worthi- 
ness of power. The only hope for a nobly Chris- 
tian future for Rome lies in the repudiation of 
that dream. Its malignant vitality is the greatest 
menace to the church in which it is cherished. 

While frankly recognizing that the past may 
be a foe as well as a friend, it is important to see 
that even when a foe the past may be made ex- 
tremely useful. The study of the mistakes of the 
[16] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

past is one of the most profitable aspects of his- 
torical investigation. By a process of criticism a 
man may be led to turn from those things in the 
mental and moral life which experience has con- 
demned. By the mental conflicts through which 
he passes in struggling his way to an understand- 
ing of their real significance he comes to his own 
place of conscious mental strength and power. 
The battles of the mind bring about the emanci- 
pation of the mind, and, in a very genuine sense, 
in this matter a man is in debt to his foes. It is 
not as a hostile army to be conquered but as a 
force of allies to be welcomed, however, that the 
past has its profoundest significance. So to live 
that no ancient good shall be lost out of the world 
is one of the supremest duties of each generation. 
Every noble intuition, every high aspiration, 
every true purpose in human life has its vital con- 
nections with great things in the past, and from 
this fact issues the moral continuity of history. 
Jonathan Edwards planned a great work, which 
he died leaving incomplete, called, "A History of 
the Work of Redemption, containing the outlines 
of a Body of Divinity including a view of Church 
History entirely new." The essential thought 
back of the work with this imposing title was that 

[17] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

the history of the world may be summed up in 
three stages : the preparation for redemption, the 
achievement of redemption, and the effects of re- 
demption. Whatever one may think of details 
of the interpretation of Edwards, it remains un- 
questionably true that the Christian comes to his- 
toric self-consciousness only as he sees himself 
and the world as involved in a great process in 
which the facts of the Christian religion are de- 
fining and commanding. It is not simply that he 
would say with Emerson, 

I am the owner of the sphere. 

Of the seven stars and the solar year. 

Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain. 

Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain. 

All this he will gladly say. But added to his 
general heritage is the sense that the secret of 
history is in the life and death and resurrection 
of Jesus Christ and all that has flowed from these 
facts. The past gives us a cause to maintain as 
well as resources to support that cause. It gives 
us a country of the soul as well as soldiers to 
guard it. So a man must come to history with a 
double attitude. He must welcome its good 
gifts and refuse its gifts of evil, and in this neces- 
[18] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

sity of choice lies the possibility of growth. A 
man must find his own way through the mazes 
of history. So mind and soul awake and de- 
velop. 

With so much of general observation we may 
survey more closely some of the particular ways 
in which life may be approached through the 
study of the past. 

I. THE APPROACH TO THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE 
THROUGH HISTORY 

The past is a bank where an unlimited number 
of ideas have been deposited to our credit. The 
currency of the intellectual world is all ready for 
our use, and however heavily we draw, and what- 
ever the changes in credit, there is no danger of 
a disastrous run on this great bank of thought. 
The immediate danger of the present is that a 
clever man will have thoughts rather than 
thought, will content himself with ideas and never 
reach a point of view. One of the great needs 
of the hour is to bring the busy readers of bright 
essays to the place where they see that men can- 
not live by epigrams alone. Intellectual pyro- 
technics are wonderfully fascinating, but they 

[19] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

never take the place of the fixed stars in the night 
sky. The man who enriches his mental life by a 
genuine knowledge of the thought of the past 
will come to have a passionate desire to see life 
in large relations, to have a real understanding of 
the totality of things. If he cares for great 
poetry Dante will show him how the thoughts 
of ten centuries were organized into a great 
poetic interpretation of life. In the interpreta- 
tion he may find enough which he cannot believe, 
but the method and the mental ideal will forever 
haunt and allure him. Thomas Aquinas was 
more than a thinker of immense astuteness who 
used the scholastic formulas as a swordsman uses 
his weapons. He was a thinker who in his own 
day gathered together all that he knew of the life 
and thought of man and built it into a marvelous 
structure — a palace of thought. Here again it 
is easy enough to find limitations, but impossible 
not to find inspiration. You are not satisfied 
with the palace Thomas Aquinas has built, but 
he makes you feel that you must build a palace 
of your own. If all this seems like depending 
too much on the Middle Ages for inspiration we 
may go farther back and find the same kind of 
stimulus in Plato or Aristotle, or we may come 
[20] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

forward and catch the contagion of Hegel's de- 
sire for a complete and total view of life. The 
man who moves freely and easily among many 
systems of thought is constantly benefited by 
what he learns to avoid as well as by what he 
learns to welcome. The sterility of that thinking 
which is mere mental manipulation teaches him 
the difference between vital and mechanical 
thought. Some New England theologians sug- 
gest that it is possible to offer a perfectly cor- 
rect and properly arranged corpse of thought in- 
stead of a living, potent, creative point of view. 
The thinker who would use his thought in the life 
of to-day moves through the past seeking what 
is vital and kindling. On the basis of what he 
learns to avoid and what he learns to welcome 
he builds the structure of his own thought. It 
is a modem structure he builds, but it is made of 
materials from many an ancient quarry as well 
as of materials freshly hewn from the rocky hills. 

II. THE APPROACH TO THE MOBAE LIFE 
THROUGH HISTORY 

"I do not possess a conscience ; my conscience 
possesses me," is likely to be the observation of 

[21] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

a man who is genuinely alive morally. And it 
may seem that this mastering ethical imperative 
of the inner life needs no reenforcement from 
history. It may seem that it speaks in its own 
name and its own right, or, if we seek a higher 
source for it, it may seem that this "stern daugh- 
ter of the voice of God" has a divine authenticity 
which is more potent and significant than all the 
movements of ethical theory among men. In a 
sense this is true. The Categorical Imperative 
is a maker of history rather than a creature of 
history. But, while admitting this, it must be 
added at once that the history of the human 
response to the moral voice is of the greatest sig- 
nificance for the life of to-day. The anarchy of 
a mental life like that of the Sophists, who had 
no definite and universal standards to offer, the 
moral helplessness of the epicurean philosophy, 
and the noble dignity of stoicism at its best have 
much to teach the men of to-day. The process by 
which Christianity set morals to music, and 
changed virtue from a stern behest into a beau- 
tiful poem, has a significance too little realized 
even in the Christian Church. The new birth of 
the sense of moral values after Imimanuel Kant's 
great work, the sense that morality is structural 
[22] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

and elemental in human life, we must never be 
allowed to forget. And that Hebrew prophet in 
the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle, has 
taught us how the modern world may be brought 
into the presence of the bush which is burning but 
not consumed, how it may feel the earth tremble 
as the servant of God descends from the moun- 
tain with the two tables of the moral law. No 
man can fail to be a new creatm^e in moral pas- 
sion and purpose to whom these great matters of 
the moral life of the past have become real and 
compelling. And when he includes in his equip- 
ment a sympathetic study of the interpretations 
of the great moral philosophers, of the practical 
growth of Christian ethics, of the play of ethical 
influences in Greek and Roman life, and of that 
moral fire which burns with such heat in the He- 
brew prophets, he will be ready to plunge into 
the ethical battles of to-day with the full impact 
of the past behind him. 

Here again there is warning as well as inspira- 
tion in the past. The study of the ethics of the 
Society of Jesus will remind a man that it is 
possible to slay ethics in the name of religion and 
that moral impoverishment always leads to spir- 
itual decay. The political maxims of Machia- 

[23] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

velli's Prince are a constant ivarning of what 
politics unrestrained by moral principles may be- 
come. 



III. THE APPROACH TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 
THROUGH HISTORY 

Robert Browning was a portrait painter who 
made pictm^es of men's souls. Through the most 
varied historic scenes he passed, all sorts of peo- 
ple in all sorts of ages he studied, and as a result 
of it all he covered the canvases which hang in 
his portrait gallery of souls. The study of his- 
tory for the sake of discovering the quality and 
the meaning and the expression of the spiritual 
life of men is one of the most fascinating employ- 
ments in all the world. The thing which Brown- 
ing did with such supreme skill every student of 
history has an opportunity of doing for himself. 
Through the broad avenues of past experience 
he may approach his own experience of the 
things of the spirit. 

The first thing which the alert student dis- 
covers is that the spiritual life is not one experi- 
ence. It is many experiences. Some of them 
are wholesome and upbuilding, some of them are 
[24] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

disintegrating and destructive. And in the 
wholesome aspects of spiritual experience there 
are ranges of usefulness and adequacy. There is 
the spiritual life represented by Wordsworth's 
mood in regard to nature. The soul is kindled 
by the presence of the wonderful world of physi- 
cal charm and beauty. The heart is drawn out 
to worship by the subtly interfused divinity which 
pulsates in Nature's life. But this may not be 
so noble a thing as it was with Wordsworth. 
Many an ethnic religion began with a worship 
kindled by nature, and by worshiping all of na- 
ture and losing moral perspective came at last to 
an emphasis on the mysterious reproductive pro- 
cesses which eventuated in a shameless apotheosis 
of vice. The spiritual life kindled by nature may 
rise to noble moral meaning or it may sink to the 
most beastly sensuality. There is the spiritual 
life represented by a worship of many varied and 
fascinating deities. The Greek religion at its best 
had a spiritual versatility of the most extraordi- 
nary character. Life was rich and diverse in its 
worship because the deities covered the range of 
possible human interests. There was scarcely a 
mood or evasive feeling which had not its deity. 
This type of spirituality gained in resiliency and 

[25] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

freshness and wide sympathy by losing in unity 
and stability and ethical power. And the deities, 
as the embodiment of evil as well as of good, be- 
came a temptation as well as an inspiration to the 
worshipers. Bacchus was a moral liability to 
his votaries. There is the spiritual life repre- 
sented by an ethical monotheism. The religion 
of Israel has its uniqueness at this point. The 
one Lord of Kighteousness as an object of wor- 
ship made spiritual life ethical and gave to wor- 
ship one commanding center of imperial power. 
How fair a flower the life of the spirit could be 
under these conditions the greatest Psalms of 
the Old Testament, the noblest utterances of 
Isaiah, Micah, and Amos testify. Morality has 
been set on fire and blazes with noble devotion 
in the hearts from which these utterances came. 
There is the spiritual life represented by a wor- 
shipful acceptance of the Incarnation of the Son 
of God in Jesus Christ. The Greek patristic 
theology was built about the Incarnation, but 
it is also true that the worship out of which the 
Greek theology came was built about the Incar- 
nation. And in many ages individuals and 
groups of men have built their piety about the 
thought that the Son of God has come into hu- 
[26] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

man life. A new sense of our nearness to God, 
a new sense of God's nearness to us, a new sense 
of the dignity of man has enriched such worship. 
There is the spiritual life represented by those 
to whom religion is a matter of participation in 
the spirit of Jesus and in his relation to God. 
This type of life looks to Jesus not as a source 
of religion, but as the discoverer of the highest 
form of religious experience. He had a relation 
to God which we are to share. He enjoyed an 
experience in which we may participate. He was 
a God-filled man, but not the God-man. Along 
such lines as this much beautiful and noble Uni- 
tarian piety has been built. It tends to make 
Jesus a spiritual comrade rather than a spiritual 
Lord. There is the type of spiritual life which 
centers in the cross. Here a man comes not sim- 
ply for inspiration, but for deliverance. He is 
glad for a revelation, but what he wants is not 
revelation, but salvation. It is not as a scholar 
seeking truth, or as a poet seeking glowing feel- 
ings of spiritual beauty, but as a man discour- 
aged by moral incapacity and weighted by sin 
that he comes to the great deed of the Son of God 
upon the cross. The sense of forgiveness and of 
complete dependence on the Son of God who died 

[27] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

for him, and of new life as he goes forth to do 
his will, are the essential characteristics of his 
spiritual life. 

When a man has seen these types of spiritual- 
ity, and many more which we have not time to 
discuss, he enters his own sanctuary of the spirit 
eager to have a religious life as sharp in moral 
quality as the poignancy of the message of the 
cross can make it, as confident in its relation to 
God as the loving deed of the Incarnation can 
lead it to be, as rich in spiritual serenity as the 
worship of the Nature poets, as varied in its sym- 
pathy as the old Greek religion, as lofty as the 
ethical monotheism of the Hebrews and as tender 
and as human as the coming to earth of the Son 
of God. He wants to be saved from a piety 
which is not ethical and a moral earnestness which 
is not mellowed by the peace of a full and rich 
religious life. The past comes with warning and 
with guidance to every man who would enter into 
the richness of the life of the spirit. 

IV. THE APPROACH TO THE EXPLANATION OF 
LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

Into this universe and why not knowing, 
Nor whence, like water, willy nilly flowing, 
[28] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

wails Edward FitzGerald in his translation of 
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The sure and 
satisfactory answer to the questions about why 
and whence and whither is one of the most im- 
portant matters in life, and in leading a thinker 
to a satisfactory explanation of life history has 
great services to perform. 

(a) A man may approach an adequate con- 
ception of the character of religious certainty 
through a study of the history of types of re- 
ligious authority. The authority of a state re- 
ligion was characteristic of the ancient world. It 
was a sort of political religious authority. Every 
battle won added to the prestige of the deity. 
Every battle lost was a demonstration of the 
weakness of the national god. The deity in a 
sense held the place of that brilliant French mon- 
arch in a far later age who said, "I am the state." 
All the sanctions of the national life supported 
the religion. It was natural that this sort of wor- 
ship should come to a climax in Rome in the 
worship of the emperor himself. In the visible 
center of imperial power was the visible represen- 
tative of worship. State and religion had become 
synonymous. There is the religious authority 
represented by an infallible church. Here again 

[29] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

an institution is made the center of religion. In 
a sense it is a taking over of the Roman con- 
ception into the Christian faith. The compulsion 
is that of a visible, far-reaching, impressive or- 
ganization. It is external, but it has all the im- 
pressiveness of a potent and imperial institution. 
There is the authority of an infallible literature. 
The institution is conquered by the book. The 
church surrenders to the Bible. A message is 
substituted for a system. A point of view takes 
the place of a great organization. A revelation 
takes the place of a closely knit ecclesiastical or- 
ganization. The Imperial Book takes the throne 
once occupied by the Imperial Pope. There is 
the authority of a mastering personality. Many 
groups of people whose assent is not commanded 
by a system or a book are completely won by the 
potent personality of Jesus Christ. They call 
him Master because he possesses the secret of 
mastery. They call him Lord because he pos- 
sesses the secret of lordship. They find their au- 
thority in Jesus Christ himself. There is the au- 
thority of an experience of personal transforma- 
tions through the power of Christ. It takes many 
forms. It has varied aspects. At its deepest and 
richest it finds a complete deliverance in the ac- 
[30] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

ceptance of the message of the cross and in the 
consciousness of forgiveness and the joy of the 
new life it has found a certainty which is deep 
and abiding. There is the authority of the social 
solidarity produced by Christian experience. It 
is not one lonely man who has found a new life, 
it is a multitude which no man can number which 
rejoices in the great salvation. And the mutual 
testimony of the multitude itself assumes an au- 
thority more and more significant as the years 
goby. 

The man who studies the historical manifesta- 
tions of these types of authority, whether in the 
characteristics of some ancient Oriental religion, 
in the worship of Imperial Rome, in the claims 
of Innocent III, or in the bold strike for free- 
dom when Luther hurled a book at the pope, will 
find much of warning and much of inspiration. 
Taking his own position on the basis of a re- 
ligion which is authoritative because it is redemp- 
tive, he will be able to secure elements of good 
and turn from elements of evil in the various 
types of authority claimed both within and with- 
out the Christian Church. Echoing through the 
Christian generations will come words like the 
words of Peter: "To whom shall we go? Thou 

[31] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

hast the words of eternal life," and the words of 
the man who, joyful in the miracle of healing, 
cried out, "Once I was blind. Now I see." The 
deepest consciousness of Christendom and the 
greatest promise of the future are expressed in 
such words as these. A church with a vital Chris- 
tian experience will always have a commanding 
authority. A church without a vital Christian 
experience will have no authority worthy the 
name. 

(b) The explanation of life should be based 
upon an experience and that experience based 
on a theology. A full and adequate Christian 
experience and a full and adequate theology are 
inseparable, and a man may approach theological 
insight through history. The outstanding defect 
of Professor William James's discussion of the 
"Varieties of Religious Experience" is his failure 
to face the significance of the beliefs back of the 
experiences. You must believe some things 
about God if you are going to have some experi- 
ences in connection with God. The student of 
history surveys the past to discover what concep- 
tions have proved most completely morally and 
spiritually creative in the generations gone. The 
past is a laboratory where conceptions have been 
[32] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

tested and the student is eager to see the results 
of the experiments. This approach gives an en- 
tirely new and fresh entrance to the realm of 
theology. The logic of history becomes even 
more impressive than the analysis of the impli- 
cations of the conceptions themselves. History 
becomes the great support of an ethical monothe- 
ism because only on this basis can a developing 
ethical life be built. History becomes the great 
defense for the deity of Christ. For only a God 
who has broken into history with all the fiery 
energy of a great compassion can permanently 
command the allegiance of dwellers in a world so 
drawn by tragedy and torn by moral weakness. 
History becomes the great interpreter of the 
cross. The sin and the guilt of the ages, the his- 
tory of the race in moral things, lifts a require- 
ment which is met only by the strategy of the 
cross. The profound student of history comes 
to see that there is no permanent resting place be- 
tween a redemptive view of history and a de- 
spairing pessimism. More than this, the cross 
as a deed of suffering rescue on the part of the 
Son of God has proved morally and spiritually 
renewing as has no other conception in all the 
world, and in this fact we find both a defense and 

[33] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

an interpretation of the cross. There is no mat- 
ter of belief on which light is not thrown by the 
test of history. The theology of the future will 
doubtless develop beyond that of the past, but 
a part of that development will consist in a new 
sense of historic meanings. Progress does not 
consist in repudiating that which has been nobly 
vindicated. Progress will consist in a genuine 
measure in realizing the significance and the im- 
plications of the past. The secure results of the 
past will be a part of any adequate future. 

(c) The explanation of life comes at last to 
be a philosophy of life. Here again the appeal 
must be to life. The actual experience of the 
past is more significant than the thought proc- 
esses of the past, though both are important. 
The study of the world-views of history will be 
fertile if it is all the while checked and inter- 
preted by a warm sense of the life of humanity 
as well as the thought of humanity. Such a 
study will see the world progressing from formal 
to vital philosophy until our own day, when we 
are coming to understand that life itself has the 
right of way. A personal philosophy, having as 
its central point of insistence the personality of 
God and the personality of man, will be ap- 
[34] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

proached and secured in many ways. One will 
be the study of the historic failure of impersonal 
philosophies and the historic emergence of per- 
sonality as the most important and vital fact of 
all. So studied life itself will pronounce the 
death warrant of some systems. It will reveal 
the possibilities of others. By a process of con- 
structive elimination a man may reach a philoso- 
phic position of personal idealism where the final 
and determining fact is an ethical God of perfect 
knowledge and perfect love and infinite power. 
The potentialities of this philosophy as a sup- 
port and inspiration in the unfolding Ufe of the 
race will be seen to be its vindication. The finally 
dwarfing effect upon life itself of all other phi- 
losophic positions will secure their overthrow. 
Of philosophies as of men it may be said, "By 
their fruits ye shall know them." 

V. LAST OF ALL, THE MEN OF TO-DAY WILL BEST 
APPROACH life's ACTIVITIES THROUGH HISTORY 

We are constantly tempted to make action a 
substitute for thought rather than the expression 
of thought. The study of the activity and of the 
conceptions of activity of the past, of the life and 

[35] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

the ideals of life, will fit a man for activities 
based upon an adequate program and an ade- 
quate ideal. 

The word "culture" is in genius an ethnic 
word, and its deepest meaning is the gift of the 
Greek life to the world. The word "service" 
is a Christian word wrought out of the pang and 
struggle of Christians. The ancient world de- 
sired to possess. Sometimes it desired to possess 
property. Sometimes it desired to possess power. 
Sometimes it desired to possess knowledge. But 
the emphasis was upon getting and not upon giv- 
ing, upon obtaining and not upon imparting. 
Greece made the thing sought a rich and noble 
and full life, but the great desire was still at- 
tainment rather than bestowal. The genius of 
Christianity is the genius of giving. It became 
an evangel by its very nature. But as the cen- 
turies went by the old-world emphasis on posses- 
sion usurped the place of the Christian emphasis 
on imparting. Monasticism had a different ideal 
from that of the Greek life. It desired holiness 
where Greece desired culture, but it desired to 
possess holiness rather than to impart it. The 
ancient world still held it firm in its grasp. With 
the coming of the Franciscan and Dominican 
[36] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

orders the desire to give began to take the place 
of the desire to get. Service began to come to its 
own. It was often a service characterized by- 
greatness of heart rather than by clearness of 
brain. There was a richness of love, but there 
was no careful scrutiny of the conditions and the 
causes of suffering. The scientific study of pov- 
erty and disease and crime and the attempt to 
remove causes instead of being content with the 
alleviation of symptoms is a purely modern prod- 
uct. The passion of the modern propaganda in 
the name of a society socially renewed must be 
a part of the equipment of the man who would 
live adequately in our time. In many regards it 
is what one must call contemporary history which 
teaches the most here. The immediate past is 
full of meaning to the man who would hve ef- 
ficiently as a part of the Christian social organ- 
ism. 

There are two features in the net result of the 
evolution of the social ideal up to the present 
which deserve emphasis. One is the sense that in 
giving fresh air, sanitary surroundings, the op- 
portunity for work, and a genuine life to all men 
we are not conferring a favor, but are giving just 
what all men have a right to demand. This is not 

[37] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

benevolence. It is mere justice. Second, there 
is the sense of a further demand for a personal 
self -giving for the enriching of other lives, the 
pouring out of personal energy and devotion in 
the cause of humanity. This is the highest ex- 
pression of the love of God and the power of 
Christ. Piety is to be vindicated by practical 
activity. The mystic must justify his beatific 
visions at last by his social passion. He must 
change heart throbs into self -giving service. He 
must unite the high-hearted enthusiasm of a 
Saint Francis with the practical skill of an expert 
student of social conditions. In all this we come 
to a conception which regards life as an ellipse 
with the individual and society as the two foci. 
Both must be kept in emphasis. 

In Alexander Dumas's brilliant romance the 
man who was called the Count of Monte Cristo 
climbed to a height, after the discovery of a great 
treasure, and cried, "The world is mine." In a 
deeper and more far-reaching sense the man who 
enters into the meaning of the experience of hu- 
manity in centuries gone can cry, "The past is 
mine," and in that cry will be involved two 
others: "The present is mine," "The future is 
mine." As he enters into his heritage he will 
[38] 



APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY 

continually come to a deeper understanding of 
the fact that the key to the past, and to the pres- 
ent, and to the future is to be found in that Di- 
vine human life, that deed of suffering rescue, 
that triumphant transformation of the heart and 
the activities of man, which are forever asso- 
ciated with the name of Jesus Christ. 

"All things are yom's ; whether Paul, or Apol- 
los, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or 
things present, or things to come; all are yours; 
and ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's." 



[391 



II 

THE RELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND 
INTERPRETATION 

ONLY a man of miraculous optimism can 
be entirely enthusiastic about the history 
of the interpretation of the Bible. In fact, there 
is a touch of something sinister about the whole 
history of interpretation as regards literature 
and movements and people. Again and again 
interpretation has come into new significance be- 
cause of the practical necessity of making an 
author mean something which is just the oppo- 
site of what he has said. Greek moral ideas de- 
veloped beyond the standards of Hesiod and 
Homer. The Greek thinkers faced the practical 
dilemma involved in possessing an ethical life 
which had quite outrun the sanctions of the au- 
thoritative Greek religion. It was necessary 
either to discredit the religion or to read the new 
ethical ideals into a literature which did not in- 
culcate them. The second alternative was chosen. 
Of course the process of facing these dilemmas 
[40] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

may have been subconscious, and the man who 
began the use of allegory to read meaning into 
ancient documents may have been a man of vig- 
orous enough belief in his religion to have per- 
suaded himself that the ideas ought to be found 
in the literature and therefore they must be there. 
It is hardly possible, however, to believe that 
some of the Greek philosophers who justified the 
allegorical method of relieving the strain caused 
by certain passages in Hesiod and Homer were 
so naive. 

The situation involving this problem assumed 
an acute form in the mind of Philo. He accepted 
much of the Greek thought. He was a loyal 
Jew. How could he make a bridge between 
Plato and Moses? Obviously allegory was the 
only method. And so Philo, with the simplest 
sincerity, builds his structure of allegory in order 
to harmonize what he thought as a Greek with 
what he believed as a Jew. Without critically 
analyzing his own processes it came to pass that 
he did not ask what an author meant. He asked 
what he wanted him to mean. A tyrannous sub- 
jectivity was on the throne of his mind. The 
right approach to the examination of the Chris- 
tian interpretation of the Bible is through the 

[41] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

intellectual world of Philo, for Philo furnished 
the intellectual background most sympathetic to 
the mental life and needs of the school of Alex- 
andria. Clement and Origen and the other typi- 
cal Alexandrians were Greeks in philosophy and 
Christians by personal conviction, as Philo had 
been a Greek in philosophy and a Jew by per- 
sonal conviction. So they faced the same sort of 
problem. Only in their case it took this form: 
How were they to harmonize their Greek philoso- 
phic thinking with their Christian convictions? 
Once again allegory formed the bridge. The 
outstanding characteristic of this type of exegesis 
may be briefly described as: 

I. INTERPRETATION WITHOUT RESEARCH 

Even if a man did have personal resources of 
erudition and certain interests connected with the 
manuscripts which conveyed the Biblical material 
— as did Origen — these did not become dominant 
in his interpretation. In the typical Alexandrian 
when it came to exegesis the approach was not 
historical. It was transcendental. 

We need to see clearly the implicit logic in 
the minds of the men who fastened allegory upon 
[42] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

the interpretation of the Bible. First, they be- 
lieved in a mechanically infallible literature. 
Second, they believed that which had no relation 
or a contradictory relation to that which was 
explicitly stated in that literature. Therefore, 
allegory alone made it possible to do homage to 
the literature and at the same time to be perfectly 
loyal to their own unfolding mental life. To 
them, again unconsciously, what a man brought 
to a passage of Scripture was infinitely more im- 
portant than what he found there, and the inher- 
ent difficulties of the Scriptures, the clash of vari- 
ous points of view and of contending opinions, 
met with the same easy solution. Whenever you 
met a problem allegory gave you wings. The 
belief in a manifold sense in Scripture was a 
natural corollary and development of the idea. 
It all involved a Bible created by the interpreter, 
for the principles of interpretation allowed him 
cleverly to inject his own views into the book he 
was interpreting. Even the vagaries of Gnostic- 
ism did not check this method, for Gnosticism was 
not met by a new exegesis but by the authority 
of a churchly tradition. The real check on er- 
ratic interpretation was not a closer study of the 
Bible but a reference of the whole matter to ec- 

[43] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

clesiastical authority. This was the method 
which was inherited by the Middle Ages. It ran 
riot through the Middle Ages and faced serious 
danger only with the Renaissance and the ap- 
proach of the Reformation. 

Two or three facts ought to be in our minds 
in regard to this method. Firsts it was used in so 
many cases by men of deep spiritual intuition 
and experience that very often their insight was 
right when their exegesis was wrong. It was 
often true that a particular passage was tortured 
to teach a meaning of which that particular pas- 
sage was completely innocent, but a meaning in- 
volving something true and important in itself 
and something actually belonging to the general 
position of the Bible, indeed a meaning elsewhere 
specifically asserted. Second, the deeper spirit of 
the Bible often possessed these allegorical inter- 
preters. Their years of patient brooding over the 
Bible had not been in vain. A depth, a richness, 
had come to them from the Bible and it diffused 
itself in their writings. Even what is valueless 
from the standpoint of scientific exegesis is often 
rich in spiritual suggestion. Third, the contin- 
uity of noble and creative Christian experience in 
the church did much to fill the writings of the 
[44] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

allegorical interpreters with Christian signifi- 
cance even when they are quite without exegeti- 
cal significance. Even when they cannot tell us 
how to use the Bible they often can tell us how 
to enter and how to develop in the kingdom of 
God. 

II. RESEARCH AS A CHECK ON INTERPRETATION 

The allegorical method had not an absolutely 
unchallenged right of way, however. The school 
of Antioch, notably in the person of Theodore 
of Mopsuestia, stood for a grammatical and his- 
torical interpretation. In place of the fanciful 
and bewildering imaginative flights of a figura- 
tive exegesis we have here a sane and sober and 
straightforward approach to the Bible. In the 
preaching of Chrysostom the method of the 
school receives its noblest expression. But the 
church at large did not take the Antioch method 
seriously. To begin with, the school did not 
produce men of gigantic stature to perpetuate 
its type of activity. Then its severely critical 
type of mind did not express either the temper of 
the age or the passion of the gospel. In the men 
of Antioch you see already emerging the prob- 
lem, to become acute centuries later, how to pre- 

[45] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

serve evangelical passion in the midst of an in- 
tellectual temper, cool and critical in its ap- 
praisal. 

Augustine united a powerful mind with amaz- 
ing instruments for close and discriminating 
thought, with a passionate intensity of religious 
life. But the allegorical method received no seri- 
ous antagonism from him. In fact, he helped to 
fasten it upon the church. 

With the approach of the Reformation we 
come upon a mood encouraging to research. On 
the humanistic side the tendency was to go back 
to Greece to find out what beauty meant, and 
this was paralleled by a tendency to go back to 
the beginning of Christianity and its literature 
to find out what religion meant. Erasmus was 
the prophet and priest of the new movement as 
applied to the Bible. The huge fabric of ecclesi- 
astical dogma, especially with respect to the pa- 
pacy, was put to the test of research. The Bible 
began to speak with something like its natural 
voice. Of course the movement was uneven and 
inconsistent, and one kind of subjectivity fought 
against another. The kind of subjectivity which 
was antagonistic to the papacy enjoyed a re- 
search which brought to light facts which were 
[46] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

uncomfortable for those who advocated papal su- 
premacy, and a new dogmatism began to read its 
tenets into passages never meant to teach them. 
Calvin, in some respects a prince of expositors, 
illustrates this mixture of a clear-cut historic 
method with willingness to be guided by the pre- 
suppositions of his own theory. On the whole, 
however, a new mood has come. You are no 
longer in the world of Peter Lombard or Thomas 
Aquinas. Research has lifted its head. The past 
has spoken. The reign of utterly fanciful alle- 
gory comes to an end. 

III. RESEARCH AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR INTER- 
PRETATION 

The dogmatism of the period when Protestant- 
ism degenerated into a scholasticism of its own 
was sure to provoke a reaction. Then the intel- 
lectual life of the world was not at a standstill. 
The birth of modern science became its youth, its 
adolescence, and then the time of its mature 
powers. And now we come upon the period of 
the really scientific study of the Bible. And its 
keynote is history rather than interpretation. 
The brilliant processes of analysis by which the 

[4.7] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

composite authorship of the Hexateuch was 
brought to light, the unearthing of the Isaiah of 
the Exile, the placing of the whole Bible in a new 
light as the result of the study of cognate religi- 
ous and contemporaneous history represent out- 
standing features of the new age. Here again 
we come upon subjectivity even where we least 
expect it, and the modern scholar has sometimes 
found it as hard to be just to a fact which did not 
fit in with his conception of evolution as applied 
to the Bible as some medieval writer found it 
hard to be just to a fact which did not exactly fit 
the philosophy of Aristotle. Sometimes we have 
reasoned in a circle. A passage has been de- 
clared to be of a late date because those ideas were 
not current at an earlier. Then, that settled, we 
have marshaled all the evidence to prove that 
these ideas were late because they nowhere ap- 
peared in early documents. A man cannot 
empty his mind even in scientific research. And 
it is usually the next generation which discovers 
just how powerful his presuppositions were. 

In the main, however, it may be said that the 

latter part of the nineteenth century came nearer 

to achieving objectivity in Bible study than had 

any earlier period. At least in many conspicu- 

[48] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

ous instances it attained an entire freedom from 
prejudice in favor of tradition. 

As to the results of all this research and analy- 
sis, it is fair to say that there has been no syn- 
thesis. We have had a scientific study of the 
BibHcal documents. We have had the most 
painstaking and microscopic research. We have 
not had an interpretation gathering the million 
details of the new method into some genuine and 
authentic totality. It would hardly be an exag- 
geration to say that nobody knows what the new 
Bible is like because nobody has seen it. Each ex- 
pert hurries timorously to his own department 
when you speak of organizing into a general view 
the results of the last half century's activity. It is 
an age of specialized research rather than of in- 
terpretation in large relations. But many wist- 
ful eyes are looking forward to the day when, to 
paraphrase the words of Matthew Arnold, we 
shall "see the Bible steadily and see it whole." 

TV. RESEARCH AS A PREPARATION FOR 
INTERPRETATION 

In the meantime thoughtful preachers have 
been confronted by a difficult situation. They 

[49] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

have had to preach (though some cynics have ap- 
plied to them the famous utterance "I do not see 
the necessity"), and they have felt that they were 
dealing with materials so much in solution that 
their perplexity was constant. Some men took 
refuge in a dark and angry obscurantism. They 
condemned research and analysis and all their 
works. Some took to practical activities as a 
means of avoiding thought. They dealt with 
Christianity as a program rather than as a religi- 
ous experience. The profoundest spirits have 
sought sources of certainty which left criticism 
free because it could not touch their position. 
Schleiermacher was a pioneer in an attitude which 
found certainty in religious experience itself. 
Coleridge made it compelling in England. Rob- 
ert William Dale of Birmingham popularized it 
in "The Living Christ and the Four Gospels." 
Essentially the position amounted to this: The 
Christian religion is a fact of the inner life which 
authenticates its own necessary materials. The 
Tractarian movement tried to meet the situation 
as Gnosticism was met in the second century by 
the authority of the church. The philosophic 
movement represented by Pragmatism, the ac- 
tivism of Eucken, the dynamic theories of Berg- 
[50] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

son, and the basic views of the personal idealists, 
have made easier a triumphant and enthusiastic 
assurance on the part of interpreters of the 
Christian religion while the problems of the Bible 
are still open. The mental sifting caused by all 
these processes has resulted in an increasing con- 
sciousness that research is, by its very nature, a 
preparation for the ultimate task of interpreta- 
tion, and that the spot where research and a liv- 
ing experience meet is the spot where the work 
must be done. 



V. SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE CHABACTERIS- 
TICS OF THE INTERPRETER 

(a) The interpreter must be a man with a cos- 
mopolitan intellectual outlook. The very es- 
sence of interpretation is the thinking of things 
together; thinking them into totality. And the 
man who does this must have a mind responsive 
to all the variety which characterizes the elements 
which make up his problem. The work of the 
interpreter is done at the spot where many de- 
partments of specialized activity meet. The 
work of the specialist in detailed research is of 
very great importance, but it would be a tragic 

[51] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

result if the training of our time produced a type 
of incarnate microscopes incapable of seeing 
things in large relations. The tendency of some 
contemporary scholars to rush to cover, the mo- 
ment anybody suggests relating what is done in 
their department to the results in any other de- 
partment, is rather discouraging. There is a type 
of mind the result of very involved and intricate 
training, which thrives on a double- entry book- 
keeping of the results of minute investigation, 
but is incapable of actual thought and is restless 
in the presence of ideas. All this is said not to 
depreciate the fullest technical mastery of de- 
tails, it is to emphasize the relative and prepara- 
tory significance of this very important work. 
Its results come to the true interpreter as data. 
The harvests of manifold departments are 
brought to his table, and with all of these he does 
his constructive work. 

(b) The interpreter must have a synthetic 
type of mind. Just because interpretation is 
synthesis the interpreter must be a man who by 
temperament, by training, and by intellectual 
sympathy fuses various materials into an organ- 
ism. He must have that passion for totality 
which characterized Hegel; a passion checked 
[52] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

and guided by many a wise restraint, but, for all 
that, always at work. He knows that in truth 
there is no such a thing as an isolated fact. 
Every fact is a part of a delicate and intricate 
organism of reality, and the capacity to follow 
the subtle relations of facts until they are seen in 
their articulated significance is fundamentally 
important for the interpreter. Some powerful 
scientists as they have moved along the lines of 
working hypotheses have liked to call the means 
by which they progressed "scientific imagina- 
tion." Whatever we call it, this power of the 
mind to project itself, to visualize distant situa- 
tions and realize the intricacy and actual quality 
of distant experiences, to reconstruct not merely 
the form but the life of the mastodon from the 
few bones which research has brought, is the very 
essence of the interpreter's power. 

(c) The interpreter must have a candor con- 
stantly on its guard against a host of invading 
dishonesties. The eye must not be allowed to 
see the thing as the eye likes the look. At this 
point the synthetic mind must be constantly on 
its guard. The work of Bauer and the Tubingen 
school is an effective illustration of the danger 
at this point. The thesis, antithesis, and synthe- 

[53] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

sis of Hegel overran the candor of the Tubingen 
school many and many a time. In fact we may 
be tempted to say that the synthetic mind can- 
not be an objective mind. To set such limits to 
mental activity, however, would be flatly to con- 
tradict the fundamental postulates of evolution. 
If we are to develop mentally it must be along 
just such lines as the combination of honest sub- 
jective interests with remorseless candor. To 
say that a mind must be empty in order to be 
independent is not to place a very flattering esti- 
mate upon human powers. The interpreter will 
be helped in this kind of honesty by a hopeful in- 
terest in the facts which do not fit into his synthe- 
sis. He will like them when he comes to under- 
stand them. The facts which fit represent present 
achievement in building up an organism of inter- 
pretation. The facts which refuse have all the 
promise of the future in them. They are full of 
the romance of the days to come. Some later 
synthesis will find a place for them and so the 
work of the interpreter will go on. 

(d) The interpreter must be alive. His task 

is expression in the terms of life and he himself 

must thrill with its energies. Past and present 

meet in the hot activity of his mind. I use that 

[54] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

word "hot" deliberately. There are some chem- 
ical reactions you camiot get without heat and 
interpretation is one of them. A man cannot 
interpret what is foreign to him. You cannot 
ask that a man whose heart has never been torn 
by life's confusions and contradictions and trage- 
dies interpret the literature which has come out 
of those very confusions. There are stages in 
the study of the Bible when you must ask a man, 
Can you observe and classify with patient indus- 
try? There are stages where you must ask, 
Have you thought deeply, and do you bring the 
instruments of a full and responsive mind? 
But there comes a time when you must ask, Have 
you lived? Have you bared your hfe to the im- 
pact of the rude, terrible reahties of experience? 
Academic life is often embryonic, and there is 
many a man busy about his task who has never 
uttered that first poignant cry when the breath 
of reality cut itself into lungs unused to air. 

The insight of life itself will throw light on 
many a dark place. A man's exegesis will pal- 
pitate with life if he brings an actual experience 
of life to it. An important corollary will be a 
new power of expression. The interpreter must 
be a master of live, haunting, compelling words. 

[55] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

The solemn and stolid commonplaceness of some 
exegesis, reminding one of Holmes's lines to a 
Katydid, 

*'Thou mindest me of gentle folk. 
Old gentle folk are they, 
Thou sayest an undisputed thing 
In such a solemn way," 

is the natural result of inner vacuity. The grip 
of live phrases will follow the activity of a vital 
manliood in the work of interpretation. 

(e) Last of all, we must face the fact that 
the literature which we call the Bible is the 
creation of a powerful and passionate reli- 
gious experience and can never be interpreted 
adequately apart from such an experience. 
One is willing to admit, to be sure, that the 
book of Ecclesiastes is not the expression of 
any very delicate and lofty spirituality. But 
the Bible as a whole may be adequately de- 
scribed as centuries of intense religious experi- 
ence made poignantly articulate. Now a man 
without the slightest personal interest in these 
things may do the most important sort of work 
in research. He may have a distinguished ca- 
reer in deft and powerful analysis of literary 
[56] 



RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION 

materials. But the last and the genuinely inter- 
preting word about the Bible must be said by the 
man who has its secret in his own heart. Al- 
biecht Ritschl used to declare — and he had no 
particular enthusiasm for traditional views — 
that the theologian must do his work within the 
Christian community. He must have the insight 
which comes from participation in the essential 
meaning of the life of the community. The in- 
terpreter, at any rate, must have this qualifica- 
tion. That passionate afflatus which created 
the literature must make its pulsation felt in the 
life of the man who interprets it. 

In some such fashion as this, gratefully accept- 
ing all the garnered results coming from every 
field of research, relentlessly candid in recogniz- 
ing every disconcerting fact, working at the 
place where the departments meet, bringing to 
his task a living experience and a synthetic mind, 
the interpreter may organize the results of the 
last fifty years of activity and the genuine de- 
posit which comes out of an older past into a to- 
tality which will have a most far-reaching sig- 
nificance in contemporary life. 

The principles which we have been discussing 
in respect of the Bible are applicable to every 

[57] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

field where there is need for research and for in- 
terpretation. Against two dangers we should 
constantly be on our guard. On the one hand 
there is the tendency to indulge in hasty and un- 
warranted generalizations, which is the constant 
temptation of the impatient mind. Here we 
must insist on the most patient and painstaking 
and thoroughgoing investigation. On the other 
hand there is the tendency to treat research as an 
end in itself, and to refuse to lift the question as 
to the significance of the material so patiently 
gathered. It is possible for a man to be keen 
and alert in the search for microscopic facts, and 
mentally dull and sluggish whenever you ask 
that these facts be related to the actual meaning 
and movement of life. Here we must insist that 
the larger work of appraisal must be done, and 
our universities must offer the training which 
will produce men capable of doing it. Research 
alone produces a catalogue of imrelated facts. 
Interpretation alone produces a subjective dog- 
matism. Together they produce the solid struc- 
ture of a scientific appraisal of life. 



[68] 



ni 

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

"Doth not Wisdom cry: 
Counsel is mine^ and sound knowledge: 
I am understanding; I have might. 
By me kings reign. 
And princes decree justice. 
By me princes rule. 

And nobles, even all the judges of the earth." 
Proverbs VIII. 1, 15, 16, 

THE university always remembers. It 
guards the shrine of the past. The great 
university always dreams. It throws the glory 
of the possible over the grim lines of the actual. 
The productive university always hopes. It 
creates a luminous future by expecting it and 
out of the expectation releasing forces which 
turn hopes into achievements. It is as honest as 
life, as frank as the hardest and ugliest facts, as 
tender as the most radiant idealism, as glad as; 
youth and as wise as age. It is the contempo- 
rary expression of that Wisdom whose words 
claiming counsel and sound knowledge and.un- 

[59] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

der standing are a perpetual challenge to the as- 
piration of men. It still offers the materials for 
government and for justice. It is the reflective 
mind of the world applied to the experience of 
life. 

When the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw 
the rise of the universities of Paris, of Oxford 
and of Cambridge, and all that intellectual move- 
ment which resulted in so many institutions of 
learning at last, an influence was released in the 
life of Europe, which was to be felt in every hu- 
man relationship. With the coming of the Re- 
naissance new elements were added and the 
meaning of the older world was poured rich and 
fragrant into the life of adolescent Europe. 
The Reformation completed the circle and the 
world went back to Israel to learn what righte- 
ousness meant as it went back to Greece to learn 
the meaning of beauty and to Rome to learn the 
meaning of law. Then came the industrial 
Revolution. The factory and the university did 
not seem to belong together and even to-day the 
problem of their existence in the same world is 
far from solved. But a new world was made by 
the industrial revolution with which the univer- 
sity must deal and which at last it must master. 
[60] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

The same eighteenth century which saw the com- 
ing of the industrial revolution saw that political 
cataclysm in France, the founding of our own 
Republic, the collapse of the theories of the 
benevolent despots, and the beginning of a more 
real political liberty in the world. In a new 
fashion the university found itself confronted by 
democracy. Then came the birth of modern sci- 
ence. The nineteenth century saw its flower and 
those vast generalizations in the name of science 
which form the background of the world in which 
the contemporary man lives. The industrial revo- 
lution began to move apace and the human prob- 
lem of labor and all its relationships became an 
object of university investigation. Sometimes 
the distant chimes of the old disciplines seemed 
dim and low enough in the midst of all the bus- 
tling intensity of the newer subjects. The uni- 
versity, in other words, was a mirror held up to 
the changing life of the world. It was more 
than that. It was an inspirer and a leader and 
a molder in the midst of turbulent and changing 
days. 

So it was in Europe. And all the while the 
new continent was developing. Its first col- 
leges paid profound tribute to the ethical and re- 

[61] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

ligious sanctions. Indeed they were the thrones 
of moral and religious leadership. They turned 
the conscience and the spirit into syllogisms. 
They represented piety regnant in the realm of 
the mind. 

Life moved hot and tempestuous in the new 
world. Liberty became more than a watchword. 
It kindled and burned and became a passion. 
The men who would not tolerate subservience to 
a human George III were quite unwilling to 
recognize a glorified George III on the throne of 
the universe. And so the intellectual life of 
America began to reveal definite sympathies with 
the critical scepticism which had swept so power- 
fully over the life of France. America has al- 
ways been a pragmatic country, however, and the 
preachers of the saddlebags managed so skillfully 
to preach the potency of a really democratic God 
that the typical American life was little moved 
by the questioning of a mind like that of 
Ethan Allen. There was a continent to be 
tamed, not to say exploited. There were thou- 
sands of practical problems to be faced. And 
as time went on even New England was not 
able to push into the newer parts of the country 
an intellectual inspiration which moved as 
[62] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

rapidly as the currents of settlement perpetually; 
passing westward. The practical mind was in 
the saddle and it left the trained mind far behind. 
The whole story is told in a sentence. John 
Quincy Adams ceased to be the typical Ameri- 
can. The typical American became Andrew 
Jackson. Still life moved rapidly. The South 
had its own fine flower of gracious life, built alas 
and alack, like that of Athens of the fifth century 
on the foundation of slavery. The civilization 
of the North and that of the South not only used 
different watchwords, but each had its own foun- 
dation. And in the very nature of things the two 
could not continue side by side. The inevitable 
conflict came. The University of popular life 
had not proven as incapable as men of finely 
trained mind might have supposed. To be sure 
it was an Adams of the stately old tradition who 
held England steady during the hardest days. 
But the untutored prairies had wrought their 
own miracle, and it was Lincoln who saved the 
nation as an organism of unified life. All the 
while learning of course languished. There 
were earnest readers of good books. There were 
careful and painstaking students. There were 
men who knew the meaning of actual scholarship. 

[63] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

There were institutions where the lamp of learn- 
ing burned. But the trained mind was not the 
dominant mind. The shrewd sagacity produced 
by the rude vigor of all the struggles of practical 
life was the quality most prized. The common 
school answered to recognized necessities. The 
university was an ornament rather than an es- 
sential feature of the national life. 

But the Republic could not avoid the chal- 
lenge which came from comparison. It did pos- 
sess real intellectual curiosity. It did feel the 
pangs of mental hunger. Schools multiplied. 
Colleges increased. The eastern universities de- 
veloped a notable intellectual tradition. The 
state universities of the middle and farther west 
began to lift their heads, and to produce produc- 
tive scholars and men of genuine erudition. 
Perhaps it was inevitable that in a country where 
the immediate return has always been wonder- 
fully alluring the type of scholarship which was 
most mathematical in its structure and demanded 
hard mentality rather than delicate taste would 
make a masterful appeal. During these days 
Oxford was shedding its subtle fragrance and 
offering its fair bloom to the world. Matthew 
[64] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

Arnold was the typical Oxford man, and when 
he came to America he saw quickly that the 
things by which he lived had never very deeply 
entered into American life. The seminar was 
doing its deft work in Germany and the young 
American scholar took to the specialized type of 
investigation which it represented with eagerness. 
It offered immediate returns for industry. It 
did not demand a full and gracious and varied 
intellectual life. So the specialized technical 
scholar rather than the finely disciplined human- 
ist became the typical product of the American 
university. In a way all this was wholesome. 
The day of carelessness had passed. Young 
scholars took infinite pains, and if most of their 
work lacked in ripeness and richness, at least they 
were laying solid foundations in accurate and 
carefully classified knowledge. Then came the 
World War. Life was turned into an amazing 
organism for the scientific manufacture of death. 
The mind of civilization was applied to the task 
of destruction. In the midst of all the fury some 
things kept emerging. With a shudder men 
realized that the most pretentious intellectual 
structure in the world had been turned into a 

[65] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

fortress of conscienceless absolutism. The very 
fever which burned in men's blood, as they or- 
ganized the whole of their nations' resources into 
instruments of destruction, kept its pulse beat to 
the desperate unabated faith that civilization 
could fight its way through the mire and emerge. 
In multitudes of lives a new idealism appeared. 
Things should no longer be in the saddle. They 
should no longer ride mankind. All nations 
should be organized about principles which would 
produce a free and potential life for the whole 
world. The new structure was to make science 
the servant of morals and the slave of brother- 
hood. America kindled at last. And the flame 
of its idealism glowed like a new sunrise even on 
the older life of Europe. Then came the bitter 
and cruel days of reaction at the close of the 
war. The inflated currency of verbal idealism 
produced its own havoc. And the days of cyni- 
cism and hard misanthropy settled heavily upon 
multitudes of men. It is in this situation that 
the contemporary American university must do 
its work. What is the contribution which it will 
be able to make? What is the leadership which 
it offers? And what are the possible heights of 
service to which it may rise? 
166} 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 
I. THE UNIVERSITY AND EFFICIENCY 

It is clear at once that there are some very- 
practical considerations at the basis of any per- 
manent and stable life for the world. The noble 
idealisms must rest on a very solid foundation of 
fact. The world must be organized for produc- 
tion. Every quality of expert management and 
coherent articulation must be brought to bear on 
a series of problems of really staggering quan- 
tity. Can the university train the man needed in 
this very concrete situation, the man prepared to 
deal with this very definite problem? The reply 
is more than the caustic critic of the schools might 
expect. As a matter of fact no men did more 
practical and skillful work than the men whom 
the universities sent to the service of the nation 
during the war. And many a man who had not 
thought of connecting the university professor 
with his ideas of practical efficiency found it 
necessary to modify his view. The typical young 
man who is sent from an American institution of 
learning has every tool of his mind sharpened for 
the practical relationships of the world in which 
he must live. The great schools of commerce 
which are thriving in so astonishing a way are a 

[67] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

conspicuous illustration of the fashion in which 
the university is functioning in relation to the 
needs of the contemporary economic situation. 
And schools of engineering and courses along 
lines similar to their activities are sending out men 
whose type of mind and whose definite training 
fit them for work in a world where the engineer 
and the technical expert have such a vast work 
to do. Psychology has become the handmaid 
of business as it was the handmaid of efficient 
war. The psychologist has entered the factory 
there to remain with his illuminating and far- 
reaching tests. The agricultural college is turn- 
ing farming into a science and the best proof of 
its practical achievement is the fashion in which 
the older type of farmer is learning to consult 
the scientific expert. In the organization of the 
world for adequate production and for an effec- 
tive dealing with practical problems the univer- 
sity is already playing a distinguished part. 

II. THE u:n^iversity and science 

All of this necessary organization as we have 

already hinted is based upon that full knowledge 

of the facts and the relationships and activities 

of the physical forces which we denominate nat- 

[68] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

ural science. In a profound sense the scientist is 
the creator of the new world in which the effi- 
ciency expert must work. And science had its 
home and its shrine in the university. The phy- 
sical and chemical laboratories might seem 
strange enough to the medieval scholar could he 
suddenly appear at one of our contemporary in- 
stitutions of learning. But they represent one 
of the most productive aspects of the universities' 
life. Their constant and patient experiment, 
their careful and thorough classification, their 
brilliant and far-reaching processes of generali- 
zation form one of the rich intellectual treasures 
of the world. And the very habit of entire 
intellectual sincerity, the remorseless truthful- 
ness which scientific study and activity develop 
in the student represent a rare and notable 
contribution of the university to contemporary 
life. Science has mastered the forces of nature 
in a way beyond the imagination of man. And 
the very process of mastery has helped to develop 
a type of man worthy to be master. The cap- 
able life of the Republic is constantly being re- 
enforced by men who can be trusted with great 
tasks because of the scientific training which the 
university has given. 

[69] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

III. THE UNIVERSITY AND TECHNICAL 
SCHOLARSHIP 

If all the resources of the past are to be at the 
disposal of the present the scientific spirit must 
be applied to every avenue of investigation 
and research. History, philosophy, politics and 
every activity of the mind of man must be studied 
with that patient candor which is back of the 
brilliant generalizations of science in the physical 
and biological realms. The collection and the 
classification of facts is to be sure the activity of 
a halfway house but it is a very necessary activ- 
ity. The constant distinction between primary 
sources and secondary authorities in every field, 
and the slow and cautious labor which moves in 
constant relation with the subtlest laws of evi- 
dence, is the necessary foundation and check of 
that hasty and unjustified process of generaliza- 
tion which is the bane of the young and over- 
confident nation. The fashion in which Ameri- 
can schools are turning out dependable young 
scholars ready for every field of technical investi- 
gation is one of the really remarkable achieve- 
ments of the American mind. To be sure all this 
has its dangers. The slow and patient methods 
[70] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

of research if followed exclusively may dull the 
synthetic powers of the mind. If this repre- 
sented all of our intellectual activity we might 
be reduced to a nation of double entry book- 
keepers doing eminently trustworthy work but 
with constantly decreasing capacity to see things 
in large relations, and with minds from which all 
freshness and elasticity and resilience and crea- 
tive energy had departed. A distinguished 
American scholar and thinker realized this in a 
fashion so acute that he spoke of the "Ph. D. Oc- 
topus." We must face this danger frankly and 
we must deal with it unhesitatingly. But we 
must never forget that all brilliant generaliza- 
tions must meet the test of the most expert in- 
vestigation and we must never forget that a na- 
tion is poor indeed which is not producing those 
patient men of scholarly industry whose care- 
fully classified facts will be the basis of the most 
far-reaching generalizations at last. 

IV. THE UNIVERSITY AND HUMANISM 

Insistent and penetrating questions arise at 
this point. You may have all the discipline and 
all the vigor and all the efficiency which charac- 

[71] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

terize the activities of which we have been speak- 
ing and still have a civilization without the heat 
of inner fire and without the light which turns 
correctness into beauty and truth into charm and 
facts into ideals. The mind which can classify 
must be followed by the mind which can appreci- 
ate and it is a subtle and difficult task indeed to 
produce this welcoming mind which makes 
friends with all the evasive and intricate mean- 
ings of life. At this point we are reminded that 
the older university so innocent of many things 
which we deem essential did right nobly produce 
that habit of culture to which belongs the fine 
and gracious word "humanism." The cultiva- 
tion of the intellect is of course infinitely simpler 
than the cultivation of taste. And the journey 
to fifth century Athens is a journey which asks 
far more than patient and painstaking industry 
of the traveler. You can be correct and quite 
without vitality. You can be an encyclopaedist 
with an unquickened imagination and an unkin- 
dled life. The tale of human experience as it has 
been poured forth in the revealing phrases of im- 
mortal literature, the passion of human struggle 
as it has told its story in the vicissitudes of hu- 
man history, the aspiration which lifted itself in 
[72] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

Gothic architecture and expressed itself in the 
pointed arch, the older sense of perfect repose 
which created the almost too perfect forms of 
classic architecture and the perennial urbanity of 
classic phrase; all these are to be made a part 
of the thought and feeling of the student. It is 
a matter of the utmost importance that in a new 
land full of self-conscious complacency as to its 
own external achievement the genius of every 
age should speak so that our young men and 
women may become citizens of the past and in- 
heritors of its treasure. The habit of sympa- 
thetic reading and vivid and understanding 
meditation, the release of all the manifold capac- 
ity for taste and feeling and appreciation, will 
give to the Republic a new maturity, a richness 
of life undreamed of before, and a fullness and 
amplitude of culture which will take its own 
place among the great living national forms of 
the world. It is possible to emasculate the study 
of English and of all literature, it is possible to 
devitalize all history until the rarest and most 
potent powers of the mind are unroused by these 
disciplines. It is also possible to make them 
the open door to citizenship in the world of 
trained and understanding appreciation and 

[73] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

taste. The whole process finds very telling ex- 
pression in the use of language itself. Even a 
powerful intellect may so use our good old Eng- 
lish speech as to leave it a poorer thing. The 
sense of all the beauty and charm and exquisitely 
revealing power of words comes with a certain 
ripeness and maturity of mind. But there are 
methods by which the process of ripening is 
quickened. It is a commonplace that America 
has never learned to use its own tongue with 
quick and elastic energy, with vital adequacy and 
with luminous power. There are noble excep- 
tions. But they leave the sands of the desert all 
the more arid. The truth is that we have yet to 
learn as a nation to love simple and noble and 
compelling and distinguished speech for its own 
sake. We are buffeted about by our own vo- 
cabulary. We do not bend words to our pur- 
pose with sure and easy mastery. In the light 
of all this it ought to be very clear that the time 
has come for a rebirth of humanism in American 
universities. Knowledge only becomes culture 
when it has passed through the crucible of a vital 
mind. And the creation of this mind is one of 
the supreme tasks of education. Only this mind 
can bring creative energy to great tasks. With- 
[74] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

out it we are a nation of second rate mentality. 
With it we have the freshness of mind which can 
project itself into new issues and meet with assur- 
ance the unexpected challenges of the new day. 



V. THE UNIVERSITY AND ERUDITION 

The technical scholar knows a particular field 
or a part of it with completeness and assurance. 
The man of culture carries the fragrance of vari- 
ous types of civilization and of various forms of 
taste and of various forms of experience about 
with him. In his own vivid imagination he has 
lived over the life of the ages. The man of 
erudition is a scholar who lives not merely in one 
department but where the departments meet. 
That largeness of mind which comes from seeing 
life steadily and seeing it whole is the greatest 
intellectual need of our time. The very quality 
of much of our training has tended to produce a 
man incapable of being an intellectual cosmo- 
politan. The solid foundation is mistaken for 
the completed edifice. And so the great temple 
of the mind does not arise. An urgent problem 
confronts the educator at this point. He would 
not abate one feature of cautious and painstak- 

[75] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

ing scholarship in relation to the details of par- 
ticular departments. But he knows very well 
that all this must be brought to an appraisal in 
the ample mind of a man who lives where the 
particular fields join and where their actual re- 
lations are seen. America has vastly more de- 
pendable scholars than ever before. America 
has reason to analyze with the most careful 
scrutiny the reasons which lie back of the small 
product of men of large and ample erudition. 
The man of erudition should, of course, be a man 
who has won his shoulder straps in some particu- 
lar field. But upon that foundation he must 
build a mental life where the returns of vari- 
ous departments are received and welcomed and 
interpreted. For every four men who give their 
lives to technical research there should be one 
man who has passed into the larger realms of 
erudition. So shall America be saved from the 
tragedy of the fragmentary mind. 

VI. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 

Men must live together. They must live to- 
gether in the countryside, in the towns and in the 
cities. They must make up states and nations 
[76] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

and they must combine to form some sort of a 
world. And here we revert to that apathy and 
cynicism which have followed in the trail of the 
World War. What can the university do to sta- 
bilize and develop and inspire the life of the na- 
tion and the life of the world? At once we are 
confronted by the most obvious teaching which 
results from historical investigation, namely that 
the period of merely critical analysis has no 
refuge against decadence, that the period which 
gives itself with eager abandon to the carrying 
out of some passionate ideal is the period of 
power. The first lesson the university has to 
give to the student of human relations is just 
that cynicism is a step toward decay. The belief 
in life is the first step in living. When we sur- 
render enthusiasms we begin to nourish ourselves 
on affectations and this food has no promise for 
any type of life in any period. The quest for a 
creative enthusiasm is the fundamental human 
quest. When the university guides its students 
on that way it is rendering them the highest 
service. 

The two principles which merge from a study 
of men's experience in living together are these : 
The necessity for self assertion and the necessity 

[77] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

for self surrender. The city or the nation which 
crushes the unfolding individual life is in process 
of committing suicide. The divine right to a 
real life and an actual opportunity is the heritage 
of every man. Any organization of life which 
blights the individual cannot permanently con- 
tinue. Every trade, every industry, every or- 
ganization must at last meet the test made inevi- 
table by the rights of the individual man and 
woman. And it must be recognized frankly that 
human rights are more fundamental than prop- 
erty rights and that every sanction must at last 
stand or fall in the light of this principle. Open 
doors must be kept before boys and girls and men 
and women all the while. But the second prin- 
ciple is equally insistent. There are a good many 
people in the world. And every individual must 
frankly face the necessity for surrender in the 
name of the common good. Society can only be- 
come organic when we recognize the far-reaching 
meaning of this principle. Every law has some- 
where hidden in the heart of it this fundamental 
sanction. And the university must perpetually 
train men and women strong to assert themselves 
and also strong to deny themselves in the name of 
the larger human good. 
[78] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 
VII. THE UNIVERSITY AND THE WORLD-ORDER 

How is the university to make all this compel- 
ling as an ideal as well as fertile in effective dis- 
cipline? Is the ultimate reality of things on the 
side of order and truth and beauty ? Is the uni- 
verse itself sound at the heart? Does the world- 
order itself justify those high idealisms and those 
noble disciplines for which we have been plead- 
ing? And it must be clear that the only safety 
for all these sanctions is in the deepest of all 
sanctions in the nature of God. 

The true university with its "freedom to teach 
and its freedom to learn" never attempts to pre- 
scribe the fashion in which its students must think 
of the ultimate realities. There are multitudes 
of ways in which men approach these high mat- 
ters and their full freedom is one of the noblest 
insistences of the university. This does not 
mean, however, that its voice must be silent re- 
garding the most effective methods by means of 
which moral and spiritual ideals have been made 
commanding. The voice of rarest and most 
radiant moral and spiritual idealism must be 
frankly heard. There is an interpretation of 
freedom which turns out to mean the inhibition 

[79] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

of anything which would make for the under- 
standing of those lofty enthusiasms which have 
most enriched the life of man. The quest for 
God must not be limited to any narrow path. 
But the quest must be at last the most defining 
quest of all. And in full candor all the impact 
of the masterful stern gentleness of the Man of 
Galilee must be met. Certain pragmatic re- 
sults which made for the cleanness and goodness 
and beauty of the world have intertwined them- 
selves with the fundamental sanctions of the 
Christian faith. It is less than honest, it is less 
than candid, to deprive the truth seeker of the 
most favorable access to these sanctions in an 
atmosphere sympathetically responsive to their 
most vital expression. At the same time it is 
cheerfully conceded that there must be the frank- 
est access to other approaches to reality under the 
terms which best express their own genius. 

This must be conceded; however. Only in a 
universe in whose ethical soundness and spiritual 
integrity a man can believe is that full and pro- 
ductive life which carries the world forward pos- 
sible to men. The university must put men 
where there is food and air and sunlight if there 
is to be real growth in the world. 
[80] 



THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC 

It is in such manifold ways that the university- 
is to build up the hf e of our own Republic. It is 
to be the creator of efficiency, the exponent of 
the scientific mind, the trainer of the technical 
scholar, the home of a rich and noble humanism, 
the guide to varied and massive erudition, the 
teacher of sound principles for the life of the 
social organism, and the interpreter of a world- 
order where man and civilization can thrive and 
grow. In all this it rises like a pyramid to come 
at last at one highest point to that reality of 
realities the God of truth and beauty, the Master 
of life and the Lord of Righteousness, the source 
of all vital energy and the dispenser of ethical 
love. 



[81] 



IV 

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REMAKING OF 

THE WORLD 

"Behold, I make all things new/' — Revelation XXI, 5. 

THE University stands at that place of 
strategy where the past meets the present. 
Its first task is to see that no ancient good is lost 
out of the world. Its second task is to fight 
ancient evil until it loses its hold upon mankind. 
Its third task is to infuse a noble and spontane- 
ous and creative activity into the minds of men. 
It is a scribe and a critic and a prophet. It is the 
master of thought and the creator of action. 

To be sure the University does not always live 
up to this high standard. Sometimes it becomes 
the "last home of dead enthusiasm, and the first 
dwelling place of budding affectations." Some- 
times it is stronger in respect of fault finding 
than of appreciation. Sometimes it is more ef- 
fective in analysis than in action. Sometimes it 
produces men of whom Prince Hamlet is the im- 
mortal type; brilliant in debate, but weak and 
[82] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

hesitating in the presence of the demand for the 
masterful deed. All this, however, simply means 
that the University may fail as well as succeed. 
And every failure points the way to possible suc- 
cess if we are discerning enough to discover its 
meaning. 

That we are coming to a new synthesis of men 
and of nations is clear to the most superficial ob- 
server of the strange and torturing experience of 
these tense and terrible days. The old word of 
the great New Testament Apocalypse, "Behold, 
I make all things news," has a challenge and a 
haunting power to-day which grows out of the 
very quality of the experience of contemporary 
life. The mighty cataclysmic forces which have 
been released by the great war will have the most 
far-reaching and transforming effect. We are 
sure of that. And the question of strategy 
which must be asked in respect of the University 
is this : What part is the institution of learning, 
with all its far-flung influence, to play in the 
transformation which is to take place in the life 
of the world? What is its leadership to mean in 
the days which lie before us? There are three 
respects in which it seems clear that a command- 
ing and decisive word ought to be spoken by the 

[83] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

University. The first has to do with ideals of 
scholarship. The second has to do with ideals of 
democracy. The third has to do with ideals of 
religion. It is of these three that I wish to 
speak. 

I. IDEALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

It is not difficult to describe the ideal of a 
scholar which was characteristic of the period 
which is now coming to a close. He was a man 
who knew the sources in a particular department. 
He was a master of the most thorough and scien- 
tific classification of his materials. When he was 
the product of an institution with a rich human- 
istic tradition, he knew how to express the results 
of his investigations in language which was vital, 
resilient, and compelling. When he was the 
product of an institution in which all languages 
were considered only as vehicles for the convey- 
ing of hard, cold facts from mind to mind, and 
no language trembled with the beauty of dreams, 
or sang with haunting music, he gave forth the 
results of his work in a style the vehicle of an 
erudition only matched by the atrocities of his 
literary construction. In any event, the point 
[84] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

of emphasis was on investigation. He was a 
criminal detective searching for furtive facts, and 
following them through trails remote and diffi- 
cult. When he was able to add to the knowledge 
of the world he became a productive scholar, and 
that was his highest ambition. The work he did 
was important, and such work always must be 
done. But when it is an end in itself rather than 
a means to an end, the type of scholar produced 
tends at last to second-rate mentality. He is a 
sort of glorified double entry bookkeeper dealing 
with the debits and credits of the mind. A dis- 
tinction needs to be made between the productive 
scholar and the creative scholar. 

The one deals with sources. The other turns 
sources into resources. The one ends with classi- 
fication. The other moves on to the largest sort 
of generalization and interpretation. The one 
lives in the microscopic specialization of one de- 
partment. The other lives where the depart- 
ments meet, and sees the significance of their re- 
lations. The one degenerates into a technical 
scholasticism. The other is constantly enrich- 
ing life and growing in fullness of life himself. 
Now it is perfectly clear that in recent years the 

'[85] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

productive scholar has had altogether too large a 
place. And the creative scholar in the days just 
before the war had almost no place at all. Even 
in Biblical study the arid touch of a technique 
unrelated to living issues made its blighting effect 
felt. A clever critic of the method once sug- 
gested a theme for a doctor's thesis in English. 
He suggested that the candidate count the words 
in the language beginning with the letter A. 
Then he was to count the words Shakespeare 
used which began with the letter A. Then he 
was to project curves showing Shakespeare's con- 
formity to the language norm. The same thing 
was to be done with B words and so on all 
through the alphabet. Then, after this ex- 
haustive investigation by a careful process, the 
results for all letters were to be worked out in 
synthesis, with curves for illustration. When all 
the work had been fully analyzed in the thesis, 
the candidate might present it with a hope 
amounting to assurance that he would be success- 
ful in obtaining the doctorate. This bit of irony 
is really a parable. It contains the secret of the 
unproductive quality of much technical work. 
It suggests a characteristic weakness in much 
[86] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

German scholarship. It makes clear the sort of 
thing which must be avoided in the vital scholar- 
ship of the new age. We are not pleading for 
a type of intellectual life which will lack pre- 
cision and full and carefully classified knowledge 
of the source material in every department. We 
are only saying that productive scholarship in 
the sense in which we have defined it is always a 
half-way house. Creative scholarship, the 
scholarship which moves out from classification 
to interpretation, and utilizes every capacity of 
the mind for initiative and action in new relation- 
ships, is the goal of the true student's effort. 
Anything less than this, the new age will weigh 
in the balances and find wanting. Only this 
type of mental activity crowning the disciplines 
of our University life will produce men capable 
of handling great human problems, masters of 
technique, yet never slaves of their own method. 
Only with this sort of ideal can we produce minds 
of the highest type, capable of the most far- 
reaching and enriching work. If one seeks a 
New Testament parallel he can find it in the dif- 
ference between the rabbinical mind and the 
mind of Jesus. 

[87] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 
II. IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY 

The danger in a watchword lies just in the fact 
that words have crevices in them through which 
the meaning drops out and is lost. When Presi- 
dent Wilson, with his wonderfully facile and 
sometimes extraordinarily telling capacity for 
phrase-making, declared that the world must be 
made safe for democracy, he struck the mind of 
the world through the power of a sentence which 
will not be forgotten. But the very peril of such 
an effective summary of the issue in a phrase is 
to be found in our tendency to use the same 
words and to have different meanings. What do 
we really mean by democracy? Do we mean one 
great and universally accepted ideal? Or do we 
mean many things, some meanings really being 
exclusive of others when we come to analyze 
them closely? There is no more important con- 
temporary task for the mind than the clarifying 
of the meaning of this word of subtle strategy. 
And this task comes as a challenge to the Uni- 
versity in a fashion whose demand cannot be 
escaped. 

There are two ways of approaching the theory 
of democracy. One is to begin with the indi- 
[88] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

vidua!. In memorable words, Sir George Adam 
Smith has described the emerging to the sense of 
the individual in Hebrew prophecy in the words 
of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. As the individual 
man is lifted from the mass, as it is declared that 
he is not caught in the tangle of human relation- 
ships, but has rights all of his own, you feel that 
the very spirit which one day will become the 
spirit of democracy has found a voice in the 
world. From this point of view, democracy is 
the giving to every individual man the rights and 
opportunities which make for the largest life. 

The other way of approaching the theory of 
democracy is through the sense of the common 
good. Man is not only a lonely, isolated figure 
in the world. He is not one man. He is a race. 
When he thinks of himself alone he becomes an 
exploiter of other men. When he forgets him- 
self in thinking of the common good, he con- 
tributes the most to life, and is saved from the 
tragedy of dwarfing the lives of other men on 
the way to his own success. From this point of 
view, democracy is the organization of life for the 
purpose of securing the common good. In the one 
case, democracy is a theory and practice related 
to the individual. In the other case it is con- 

[89] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

sidered to be a theory and practice related to 
society. 

As a matter of fact, each of these conceptions 
contain elements of danger, and each alone is in- 
complete. When you build your conception en- 
tirely about the individual, you tend more and 
more toward philosophical anarchy, toward the 
theory that any man ought to be allowed to do 
anything, in any way, at any time. If you think 
of the expression of the meaning of the individual 
life as the ultimately significant matter, the indi- 
vidual to allow no restraint to stand in his way, 
life becomes a nightmare of clashing individu- 
alities, each passionate in his desire for personal 
realization, each hating all the others because 
they stand in his way. On the other hand, when 
you build your conception about society alone, 
difficulties soon emerge. The world becomes a 
vast machine in which the individual life has no 
real and valid meaning. It is submerged in the 
group. The common good turns out to be un- 
commonly bad when it crushes the individual life. 
The free spontaneous qualities which are the very 
glory of personality depart. Initiative becomes 
impossible. Freshness and resiliency of mind 
are lost. Instead of being a person who uses 
[90] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

machines, man becomes a machine who has lost 
his personality. The color of life fades, and 
there is a dull gray everywhere. Life becomes 
a vast orphan asylum in which all the orphans 
wear the same sort of uniform. 

This analysis of the tendencies implicit in the 
characteristic contemporary interpretations of 
democracy surely makes evident the necessity for 
close and clear and courageous thinking. What 
ideal of democracy will the University of large 
and adequate leadership offer to the world of to- 
morrow? The answer is not far to seek. The 
very limitations of the two positions we have 
been discussing suggest that they must be made 
to supplement each other, and that they must not 
be drawn up in battle array the one against the 
other. The fundamental principle can be put 
in a very few sentences, though its implications 
are most far-reaching. Democracy is found in 
that articulation of life where the individual re- 
ceives all that can come to him without interfer- 
ing with the common good, and society receives 
all that can be given to it without crushing the 
individual and interfering with his capacity for 
initiative and spontaneous putting forth of 

[91] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

power. We must not work out our conceptions 
of democracy from the individual and his signifi- 
cance alone. We must not work out our con- 
ception of democracy from society and its 
significance alone. We must keep the two in 
constant and equal perspective. When it comes 
to details, such close and delicate work will 
require the utmost skill of the most highly 
trained minds. And here the University ought 
to do work of the utmost value. When we 
ask how the two elements in the problem can 
be treated with justice in a practical way, 
the answer is that life must become an organism 
and not merely an organization. An organiza- 
tion may be a deadly and crushing mechanism. 
An organism is not a machine. It is alive. And 
in the very fact of its vitality you have the solu- 
tion of problems a machine can never meet. 
Jesus put the heart of the whole matter in his fer- 
tile figure of the vine and the branches. Here 
you do not have mechanical connection. You 
have vital connection. And in such vital rela- 
tionship the individual receives to the full all that 
is demanded, and the very relationship which in- 
sures the most to the individual most completely 
secures the common good. It is as an organism 
[92] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

of love that we will find the final expression of 
democracy, and at the same time the final expres- 
sion of Christianity. 



III. IDEALS OF RELIGION 

The need of a masterful and adequate word 
about religion and its place in human life is obvi- 
ous to all. What are the elements of the prob- 
lem and what are the demands which are to be 
made upon the University at this point? Such 
questions as these make inevitable another series 
of questions which penetrate to the very heart of 
life's most fundamental problem. What is re- 
ligion? Is it an experience or a program? 
Is it man's attitude toward God, or is it God's 
attitude toward man? Is it a group of pro- 
foundly articulated convictions about God and 
the world and man, or is it a series of personal 
relationships between God, the world and man? 
Is it a passion for God, or is it a passion for man ? 
Does it take its rise in a terrible ethical problem 
and come to its full expression in a deed of 
Divine rescue, or does it grow out of human aspi- 
ration, and is it the flower of the normal and 
happy evolution of men? Can we keep religion 

[93] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

if we lose God ? Can we keep religion if we lose 
ethics? Such questions as these open vast and 
bewildering fields of thought. One or two obser- 
vations, however, can safely be made in respect of 
them. The first is that no interpretation which 
ignores the fundamental ethical cleavages in 
human life can keep its hold upon men. Re- 
ligion either speaks in the voice of an ethical de- 
liverer, or it has no voice of permanent power. 
The second observation is that religion includes 
many things we have been wont to put over 
against each other. The fallacy of "either — or" 
has caused no end of confusion in thought about 
these matters. Eight times out of ten when we 
say "either — or" we ought to say "both." Re- 
ligion is an attitude. It is also an experience. 
It is a point of view. It is also a pro- 
gram for human life. It is a mystical rap- 
ture. It is also a social passion. It is an 
ethical deliverance. It is also a rich and grow- 
ing life lived among men. When religion 
speaks to a part of human nature it becomes 
a matter of over-emphasis on one side and 
of under-emphasis on the other, and so produces 
unlovely and unhappy results in the thought and 
in the life of men. It must speak to all of hu- 
[94] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

man nature, and its authority must lie exactly in 
the fact that it fits the manifold and bewildering 
aspects of human need, and leads the individual 
and society to a life of righteousness and fullness 
and power. The fact that the one great Life, 
with its tragic pangs of vicarious suffering and 
its glory of immortal victory, speaks to every 
part of human nature with a fundamental and 
perpetual appeal is the secret of the vital power 
of Christianity to command the minds and the 
hearts and the consciences of men. When all 
this ceases to be merely an analysis and becomes 
an experience of new and abounding life, it goes 
forth like a knight in armor to win victories 
everywhere. It thrills with the marvel of God's 
adventure in rescuing men, and with men's ad- 
venture in flinging themselves in vital trust upon 
the God of powerful rescue, and going forth to 
do His will in the world. The experience of 
men in living contact with the suffering, sum- 
moning God, becomes a force to renew the world. 
No man in the days before us reahzed these 
things with a more acute and thorough appre- 
hension than Dr. Robert William Dale, whose 
name grows in significance as the days go by. 
If he were with us we may be sure that with a 

[95] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

high and commanding masterfulness he would 
be interpreting vital religion with imperial 
power. Perhaps in this college so dear to him 
he would be making the religious sanction 
authentic to the men of a perplexed and bewil- 
dered age in one of those visits when he seemed 
to sweep through eternity with his great and far- 
ranging mind. 

The task of the University in the light of this 
appraisal of the problem stands boldly before us. 
First it must open its life to the vital grip of 
experiences which may be articulated by the 
mind, but for which no mental activity is a sub- 
stitute. In the eighteenth century a young Ox- 
ford student took all the strange risks of redis- 
covering the meaning of vital piety, and his land 
and his age were changed as a result. The ad- 
venture of the ethical explorer and the spiritual 
pilgrim must be made again in our Universities, 
and so a new type of ethical and religious leader- 
ship will be born. Then this compelling and 
first-hand experience must be translated into an 
intellectual interpretation and a social pro- 
gram. It must press as deeply as the power 
of the mind to think, and it must reach as far as 
the power of the will to act. So, with an author- 
[96] 



REMAKING OF THE WORLD 

ity based upon its power to satisfy human need, 
and an interpretation based upon a firm grasp of 
the fact that only a personal world can retain any 
sort of meaning, with an openness of inner life to 
those currents of inspiration which logic can 
classify, but can never provide, the University 
will become in a noble sense a spiritual leader in 
the new day. The wailing hesitations of the de- 
cadent mind will be succeeded by the powerful 
affirmations of a mind whose intellectual robust- 
ness has its rise in deep sources of moral and 
spiritual power. 

The challenge of the day, when the Master of 
Life, working with the men who dwell in the 
world, will make all things new, is hard upon us. 
The testing, far-reaching question has to do with 
our capacity to rise to the opportunity the times 
present. We look to the great centers of learn- 
ing for voices which shall unite the richness of the 
past with the potencies of the present and become 
our leaders in the remaking of the world. 



[97] 



THE PREACHER AND THE FORCES OF 
DEMOCRACY 

DEMOCRACY is not an idea. It is a 
spirit. It is not a mechanical formula. It 
is a living experience. It masters and organizes 
a number of ideas into vital forces. It is the 
profoundest of the compelling energies of con- 
temporary life. The preacher who would be an 
actual leader must apprehend the significance of 
democracy. In him it must become articulate. 
He must come to understand what it is not as 
well as what it is. And he must see its relations 
to the profoundest realities of life. 

I. PERSONAL DEMOCRACY 

The proper starting point for a discussion 
which is meant to be an interpretation as well 
as an analysis is a consideration of a man's atti- 
tude toward himself. A democrat in this per- 
sonal sense is a man who feels that his own life 
has a real meaning, an individual significance, a 
[98] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

quality to which he must be completely loyal. 
Many men of haughty bearing are really men of 
much self-distrust. They are trying all the while 
to hide how little they think of themselves by 
high and mighty manners. The personal demo- 
crat has a profound sense of loyalty to his own 
life. He is not an egotist. "An egotist is not a 
man who thinks too highly of himself. He is a 
man who thinks too poorly of others." The per- 
sonal democrat is careful to avoid being swept 
away by crowd judgments. He is watchful with 
a critical scrutiny of those invading fashions of 
thought and life which would interfere with the 
integrity of his own life. Very assertive men are 
often very imitative men. They substitute vigor 
of action for independence of thought. The per- 
sonal democrat is willing to be taught. He is 
willing to be guided. But all that he receives 
must be capable of appropriation by his own 
growing life. This deep personal loyalty gives 
a man a certain steadiness in all the confusion of 
human experience. What he asks for himself 
he gladly gives to other men. He lives in a 
world of persons, where each life must have room, 
and at the cost of any sacrifice must be loyal to 
its own deepest meaning, must keep its own in- 

[99] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

tegrity. The future of art and letters, and of all 
the movements and activities depending upon 
worthy spontaneous personal initiative lies here. 
In personal democracy they find their greatest 
hope. 

II. SOCIAI. DEMOCRACY 

Putting it in the sharpest and most clear-cut 
fashion, we may say that a social democrat is a 
man who is never bored in the presence of a 
human being. He has such a sense of the mean- 
ing and value of every life that every life be- 
comes fascinating. This may seem like a coun- 
sel of perfection. It only means that when we 
fall below this standard we are still men, but we 
are not at the moment democrats. At this point 
Jesus was a perfect expression of democracy. 
He saw such alluring and summoning potencies 
in every human being that all lives stirred him. 
He amazed men by calling to some power within 
of which they had never dreamed, and as they 
listened to his summons a flutter of response in 
their breasts told that the call was not in vain. 
The social democrat is so sure of men's capacity 
that he is not too much cast down by their his- 
tory. Gilbert Chesterton said somewhere that 

' [100] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

Robert Browning was an astute detective, con- 
victed bad men of unsuspected virtues. This 
genius for finding the promise in every human 
life is an essential part of social democracy. 
There is another element, however, which is of 
strategic importance. The social democrat be- 
lieves that together men are to reach the goal of 
life. He knows that a man reaches fullness of 
life not alone but in relations. In the fullest 
sense Robinson Crusoe could not be a democrat 
without the presence of the man Friday. And 
it takes all human types to achieve the full mean- 
ing of social democracy. Each man has the right 
to feel that he has something to give without 
which the whole would not be complete. There 
is a splendid combination of legitimate self-in- 
terest with unselfishness in the way in which the 
social democrat is all the while trying to supple- 
ment his own life by the lives of others and to 
bring to the lives of others the very best culture 
and mental development. 

III. INTELLECTUAL DEMOCRACY 

The intellectual aristocrat is a man who be- 
lieves that only a small portion of the people alive 

[101] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

in any generation will ever be able to rise to the 
height of the best which he has to give. The in- 
tellectual democrat is a man who believes that all 
men have it in them to respond to the ultimate 
intellectual meanings of life, and that the best of 
culture should be made the possession of all of the 
people. He does not deny mental differences. 
He does not reduce men to a dead level. But he 
believes that all the permanently significant ideas 
can be brought within the reach of all sincere and 
growing men. He believes that any culture con- 
fined to some one social group tends to wither and 
decay. He believes that only democratic culture 
is saved from senility. Deeper than this, he be- 
lieves that the common life and experience is rich 
in meaning which must secure adequate intellec- 
tual expression and interpretation. He is saved 
from slavish imitation of great old cultures by 
a compelling conviction that fresh sources of 
mental and aesthetic inspiration are all the while 
waiting in the throbbing and inarticulate life of 
the people. Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in his 
whole attitude toward the common American life 
is an exponent of this sort of democracy. He be- 
lieves in the perpetual inspiration which comes 
from the common life. The implications of these 
[102] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

fundamental convictions with regard to popular 
education are obvious. The common school, the 
high school, and the State university are the at- 
tempt of the commonwealth to function as an in- 
tellectual democracy. They rest on the right of 
all the people to have access to the best which can 
be known. 

IV. ETHICAL DEMOCRACY 

When a man of vivid artistic temperament 
claims a right to a code of immorals suited to his 
temperamental demands he at once reveals the 
fact that he is not an ethical democrat. A bril- 
liant member of a certain church is said to have 
defended himself, when criticized for moral 
lapses, by saying that he was a genius, and could 
not be judged by ordinary standards. Such an 
attitude is not only a repudiation of democracy 
in ethics, it is also a repudiation of ethics itself. 
In this reahn if there is more than one standard 
there is no standard. Ethical democracy rests 
upon the principle that there is one right for all 
men everywhere. The moral law is the same for 
rich and poor. It is the same for learned and 
ignorant. There is one ultimate standard of 
righteousness for all the world. Here we come 

[103] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

upon an important practical matter. Ignorance 
cannot affect the standard. But ignorance may 
affect a man's ethical responsibility. The fact 
that he did not know that a deed is wrong does 
not change the nature of the deed, but it does 
change the psychology of the deed, and it does 
affect the question of guilt. You need to have 
intentional violation of a standard a man knows 
in order to have personal guilt, but any violation 
of the true standard is a tragic break in the ethi- 
cal harmony of life. Out of these facts comes the 
necessity for ethical education. The standards 
which the long experience of the race has vindi- 
cated should be made clear to all men every- 
where. 



V. ECCLESIASTICAL DEMOCRACY 

The church, in so far as it is a true church, 
is an organized spirit. It is the invisible life in 
Christ taking the form of visible organization. 
In this organization all men who share the Chris- 
tian life are peers. All the differences of posi- 
tion in the Christian church which is true to the 
essential meaning of the Christian life are differ- 
ences for the sake of administrative efficiency. 
[104] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

In ecclesiastical citizenship every member of the 
church ranks with every other member. The will 
of the Christian commonwealth (meaning by 
commonwealth the members of the church) is the 
source of ecclesiastical power. All officers, or- 
ders, all boards, all aspects of organization derive 
their meaning and powers from the people who 
make up the church. They give and they take 
away. Of course the temptation and the danger 
of highly organized ecclesiastical systems is that 
they will part company with Christian democ- 
racy. The very genius of the Church of Rome 
is undemocratic. Luther's protest in the six- 
teenth century was based upon a great principle 
of ecclesiastical democracy. The heart of this 
principle is that any man with a Christian experi- 
ence has a right to stand out against the whole 
hierarchy if the church authority contradicts that 
experience, and as every man may have that ex- 
perience, as a direct gift of God, with one swift 
cut of the knife this principle does away with ec- 
clesiastical aristocracy and autocracy. The 
church which is based on Christian experience 
always has the root of democracy in it. It may 
be episcopal in its form of government, but its 
bishop is simply an efficiency expert selected for 

[105] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

a particular task. He is the creature of the 
church. He is responsible to the church, and at 
no moment does he have any authority other than 
that which the church delegates to him. As an 
ecclesiastical democracy the church keeps nearest 
to its own sources of power, and in profoundest 
relation to the truly creative energies of contem- 
porary life. 

VI. POLITICAL DEMOCRACY 

The whole science of government builds itself 
about the relation of the individual to the state. 
When Protagoras, in the fifth century B. C, an- 
nounced that the individual man was the meas- 
ure of all things, the basic idea of one interpre- 
tation was clearly announced. When in the same 
century Socrates declared that not in the indi- 
vidual but in the class would you find the stand- 
ard, and when in the fourth century Plato de- 
veloped this conception so far that he insisted 
that the individual only had such reality as it ob- 
tained by participating in the general, the idea, 
the opposite view had been definitely brought 
within the arena. According to one view the 
state exists for the sake of the individual. Ac- 
[106] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

cording to the others the individual exists for the 
sake of the state. This second view is central 
in Plato's classic Republic. The Middle Ages 
represent the play of these ideas. First the in- 
dividual is submerged. You have the Holy Ro- 
man Empire. You have the Holy Catholic 
Church. The class is the significant thing. The 
individual is quite out of sight. In the eleventh, 
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the solidarity 
represented by the church and the solidarity rep- 
resented by the state are struggling, but there is 
no thought of a world-wide emerging of the in- 
dividual. It is the age of triumphant philoso- 
phical reaHsm in the life of the world. But there 
are mutterings even here. Nominalism with its 
emphasis on the individual lifts its voice even in 
this period. The mutterings become louder, and 
when Luther makes his great protest in the six- 
teenth century the individual has emerged to re- 
main in the modern world. The eighteenth cen- 
tury was full of the sense of the significance of 
the individual. The reaction after the French 
Revolution and the fall of Napoleon was back to 
the idea of the submerging of the individual in 
the state. In our own country the two ideas have 
always been fighting. The Federalists — with 

[107] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

Alexander Hamilton — and their successors by 
whatever name have put the state first. The men 
who followed Thomas Jefferson and their suc- 
cessors have put the individual first. As a matter 
of fact the party in power has always tended to 
an emphasis on federal authority. The party out 
of power has always tended to watch it with sus- 
picion. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and 
Woodrow Wilson have found that the exercise 
of presidential power draws men into the federal 
group. Thus politically some men have thought 
of life as a circle with the individual at the center. 
This when carried to its extreme implication has 
meant philosophical anarchy — like that of Proud- 
hon, born in 1809, the year of Lincoln's birth, 
died 1865, the year of Lincoln's death. Others 
have thought of life as a circle with the state at 
the center. This when carried to its extreme im- 
plications leads to Prussianism, like that of the 
German Empire to-day. Real democracy in the 
political realm may be said to lie in a conception 
different from either of these. It regards life, 
not as a circle with the individual at the center, 
and not as a circle with the state at the center. 
It regards life as an ellipse with two foci: one 
the individual, the other the state. The indi- 
[108] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

vidual and the state are in equal emphasis. 
Neither is allowed to usurp the place of the other. 
The individual receives all the freedom that is 
consistent vi^ith the common good. The state re- 
ceives power up to the point where it would usurp 
the legitimate rights of the individual. In a true 
democracy the people secure their will, but are 
guarded from securing their mood. They can 
have their permanent desire, but they are saved 
from the results of sudden gusts of popular pas- 
sion. Such a body as the United States Senate 
was planned to avoid this latter effect. When 
the checks themselves tend to become tyrannical 
men seek methods to check the checks. The 
popular election of senators in our own country 
has this in view. In a real democracy the popu- 
lar will as expressed by the majority of the na- 
tion is the decisive authority, and this will is given 
such functioning organization as shall keep indi- 
vidual freedom and the common good in equal 
emphasis. 

There is always danger that certain types of 
mind will mistake comfort for freedom. After 
1871, when the Socialists were increasingly sig- 
nificant, Bismarck, that astute statesman, tried 
to curb them. When this failed he tried by a 

[109] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

subtle process to buy off the people from new and 
dangerous interests. He saw that there were two 
things back of the general unrest. One was a 
desire for comfort, the other was a desire for 
freedom. He knew that freedom was inconsis- 
tent with his highly articulated policy of state 
control, but he organized the state in such a fash- 
ion as to offer efficient administration and com- 
fort such as had not been dreamed of before. 
The study of Germany in the last quarter of a 
century is a study of efficiency and comfort se- 
cured at the expense of personal freedom. The 
people accepted the price Bismarck offered. 
They sold their freedom for the ordered life and 
the old age pensions and all the skillful organiza- 
tion of which we have heard so much. The re- 
sult was striking enough, but it was the farthest 
remove from democracy. Although Karl Marx 
had to go to England to secure freedom and pro- 
tection to write "Das Kapital," he did not escape 
from the danger of accepting an ideal of organ- 
ized comfort which depreciated personality. So- 
cialism, with all its splendid human passion, has 
found it difficult to avoid that mechanical view of 
life in which there is organized comfort, but no 
real freedom, no real democracy. 
[110] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

To what degree is the United States actually 
a democracy ? If we try to answer the question, 
turning our thought to the franchise, we shall 
find that in some of the New England colonies 
only church members might vote, that after the 
adoption of the constitution up to the time of 
Andrew Jackson there were States where only 
property owners voted, that it was only after 
the Civil War that all men could vote, and we 
are only approaching the time when all mature 
human beings of rational mind may vote. If we 
approach the matter from the standpoint of the 
functioning of political parties we shall find that 
in the early days the party was the instrument of 
actual and vital political ideas. But as the coun- 
try develops, especially after the Civil War, we 
find the party existing for its own sake, we find 
the professional politician using his powers es- 
sentially to keep in public life, often exploiting 
and partly serving his constituency. The ''leave 
to print speeches," circulated not because they 
ever had influence on legislation, but for the pur- 
pose of influencing a man's voting constituency 
to believe that he is doing something in Wash- 
ington, the party organization submerging the 
individual politician to loyalty to a big and pow- 

[111] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

erful machine, illustrate at present this situation. 
In the early stages of the development of the 
Frankenstein of party the independent evolved. 
He turned from the party because the party was 
corrupt. He was incorrupt and impotent. To 
his horror he discovered that the big chiefs of 
politics loved him. He was a safety valve they 
knew how to manage. After the failure of the 
independent there developed the party man who 
played the game for the sake of ideals and not 
for poHtics only. Mr. Roosevelt was the pioneer 
in this regard. In fundamental political philoso- 
phy Mr. Wilson has followed quite in his steps. 
This type of leader knows all the passwords, is 
part of the big organization, but uses all his 
power to bend it to the purposes of true pa- 
triotism. The difficulty is that such a leader has 
to pay too large a price. It was so with Mr. 
Roosevelt. It is so with Mr. Wilson. Recently 
Mr. Wilson secured some forward-looking legis- 
lation at the price of what has been called the 
worst pork-barrel Congress since the Civil War. 
Thoughtful men are beginning to feel that the 
party man per se, the independent, and the man 
who plays the game with principles back of all 
he does, all represent an inadequate functioning 
[112] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

of democracy. They have observed a remarkable 
tendency in the great pohtical parties to come 
near to an equilibrium and more and more they 
are seeing the possibility of balance of power 
groups which will throw the weight of an or- 
ganized independency toward forward-looking 
men and measures in every Congressional dis- 
trict. The National Voters' League with its 
periodical, "The Searchhght on Congress," has 
come as with a flood of light on the situation in 
Washington to offer practical guidance to such 
men. 

All this may seem to involve a rather dark pic- 
ture, but this matter of decisive importance must 
always be remembered. In the United States 
when things go wrong it is our own fault. The 
people have the power. They can have an im- 
proved situation whenever they exercise the 
power in their possession and secure it. When- 
ever a demand of any sort becomes really na- 
tional the politicians make haste to satisfy it. 
The Declaration of Independence was a great in- 
dividual document. The Constitution of the 
United States attempts to keep both federal and 
individual powers in actual emphasis. The 
United States has the power and the promise of 

[113] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

working out that ideal Political Organization 
where free individuals and a strong state are 
united in an efficient democracy. 



VII. INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY 

It is a commonplace to say that the inventions 
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have 
produced a new industrial world. When a ma- 
chine run by one man can do work formerly done 
by a hundred men, the question of what is done 
with the amount formerly given to the other 
ninety-nine men comes to be of immense signifi- 
cance. The question as to what becomes of the 
other ninety-nine men is of even greater signifi- 
cance. The two essential problems of modern 
industrial organization are, first, a proper di- 
vision of the product of the harnessing of earth's 
energies through machine power ; second, an ade- 
quate utilization of the powers of all workers 
through new forms of activity growing out of 
our richer and more complex life. Some hard- 
ship in the process of readjustment is inevitable, 
but by a deliberate organization of the industrial 
forces it must be reduced to a minimum. 

The fundamental principle of industrial de- 
[lU] 



PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

mocracy is the organization of the forces of the 
world about human values and not about things. 
Personality is to be recognized at its true value, 
and the very organization which has been used to 
exploit personality is to be used to protect and 
develop it. The minimum of result which will 
satisfy the requirements of industrial democracy 
may be expressed thus : The producing and dis- 
tributing agencies must be so organized that, 
first, a wholesome sanitary environment shall be 
given to all men. Bad air and foul surroundings 
cannot be tolerated anywhere in a democracy. 
Second, good food in ample quantity must be 
within the reach of all men and women and chil- 
dren; third, adequate and comfortable clothing 
must be within the reach of all ; fourth, there must 
be for all people sufficient leisure, and such means 
of utilizing it, that there shall be a growing rec- 
reational life for all; fifth, there must be time 
and means for the intellectual growth and the 
enjoyment and development which comes with 
the cultivation of eesthetic taste ; sixth, there must 
be the means and the stimulus for the recogni- 
tion and development of the spiritual life. All 
this simply means that the physical, mental, 
moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

all the workers must have a definite place in the 
organization of the industrial world. Questions 
of property must be decided in the light of this 
principle. The important matter is not who 
owns the property. It is that the property must 
never be used so that it blights the life of the 
people. The question of wages must be decided 
in the light of this principle. It is a question of 
such efficient organization that every worker shall 
receive what is necessary for a growing life for 
himself and his family. The matter of the degree 
of state ownership must be decided here. At 
whatever point private ownership proves in- 
capable of organizing industry so as to secure 
the all-round growth of the workers, the state 
must undertake to do what is beyond the skill 
of private enterprise. Industrial democracy does 
not imply equality of possession. It does imply 
the absence of the stifling and of the exploiting 
of human beings. The final world in wealth will 
not be a plain. It will contain moimtains, but 
thej^ will be mountains a man in any group who 
pays the price of industry and brain power can 
climb, and the level of life below the mountains 
will have wholesome surroundings and helpful 
environment for all. Industrial democracy rec- 
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PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

ognizes the right of every man to obtain by labor 
good food, good air, good clothing, and adequate 
opportunities for himself and his family, and 
it keeps great doors of opportunity open for all. 
In the present organization of society all those 
features are to be sought which give standing 
ground to the weak, and save from exploitation 
those who might be broken under the weight of 
unethical power. In this sense collective bar- 
gaining is an essential feature of the present 
democratic program. It is the only method by 
which the parties to the contract are made able 
to meet on a platform where each is strong 
enough to command the respect of the other. 
But collective bargaining itself may become a 
danger if the forces of labor are strong enough 
to be tyrannical. Democratic bargaining in- 
dorses three units: a representation of capital, a 
representation of labor and a representation of 
the public. Then those involved in the result are 
all represented and the majority vote can be 
trusted. 

Industrial democracy is essentially Christian 
democracy, for its putting of human values above 
material values is after the very pattern of 
Jesus's thought for men. Industrial democracy 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

in its final form will recognize and reward the 
manual laborer, the inventor, the organizer, the 
superintendent, the sales manager, the publicity 
expert, the man who makes plans for large en- 
terprises and carries them out, the artist, the 
poet, the thinker, and the seer. All of them it 
will regard as part of the productive and dis- 
tributing organism of the world, whose energies 
are bent upon making the world's resources the 
possession of all workers of all types. 

VIII. SPIRITUAL DEMOCRACY 

At first there is likely to be some confusion 
when we come to speak of applying the prin- 
ciples of democracy to the spiritual realm, and 
careless thinkers are tempted to believe that the 
recall of the judicial decisions of the Almighty, 
and a human initiative and referendum with ref- 
erence to man's relations with God are involved 
in spiritual democracy. Here we must empha- 
size a fundamental matter. Democracy is not the 
foe of distinctions. It is the foe of artificial dis- 
tinctions. It recognizes real differences, but it 
repudiates those which have no genuine validity. 
In what sense, then, may we speak of democracy 
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PREACHER AND FORCES OF DEMOCRACY 

in a realm which has to do with men's relations 
with a perfect and absolute God? The answer 
is more simple than we might be inclined to be- 
lieve. It involves three facts: first, God per- 
fectly loves all men ; second, God deals with men 
in the most scrupulous regard for their own na- 
tures and the structure of their lives ; third, God 
deals with all men in the light of their environ- 
ment and opportunity. This means that every 
man has real standing-room in the presence of 
God. In this sense Absolute means simply God's 
ability to take everything into account in dealing 
with every man, and in this final and thorough 
fairness we may say that God is the only perfect 
democrat and the source of all democracy. Men 
have differences in capacity. These God recog- 
nizes, and for every man there is waiting all that 
he is capable of receiving from God, and a train- 
ing which will make him capable of receiving 
more. All Christian spiritual work — such as the 
labors of the evangelists and the endeavors of the 
missionary — has as its goal the bringing of men 
to the place where they know of these riches of 
personal fellowship which God offers to all men. 
The fundamental genius of missions and the fun- 
damental genius of democracy are one. A com- 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

pletely undemocratic religion would never un- 
dertake the missionary enterprise. Indeed, we 
may say that the work of Jesus Christ was es- 
sentially an endeavor to restore in humanity a 
capacity for functioning democracy which evil 
had thwarted. The Cross is the greatest dy- 
namic which the world knows in the direction of 
producing the spirit of democracy, and the Chris- 
tian life as an experience is essentially a realized 
brotherhood, a glorified democracy. 

An attempt to say in the briefest outline what 
thrills as living passion in the most vital move- 
ments of contemporary life has the disadvantage 
of offering a skeleton of thought rather than a 
vivid and compelling and living picture of great 
energies at work. In the preacher's mind and 
heart these things are to become more than for- 
mulas. He is to feel the throb of them. He is 
to live in the light of them. Thus his interests 
vnll become as wide as humanity and his sympa- 
thies as varied as the quality of human experi- 
ence. Thus all his energies will be at the com- 
mand of those forces which move toward that 
Christian democracy which is in the making. 



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VI 
MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

HENRY VAN DYKE has made a declara- 
tion in one of his poems to the effect that 
this is a bad day for kings. There is a sense 
in which it is also a bad day for queens. This is 
at least true of the queen of the sciences. She 
seems to have been thrown forcibly from her 
throne. She lies at its foot with body wounded 
and garments torn, and men pass her by in care- 
less scorn. Systematic theology has indeed fallen 
upon evil days. Men are thinking things apart. 
They are not thinking them together. They are 
interested in the qualities of separate fragments. 
They are not interested in the fashion in which 
all the parts of life articulate in a great whole. 
The typical mind is analytic. It is not synthetic. 
It is busy with pieces of Hfe. It has never seen 
life. It is busy with bits of experience. It has 
never sensed experience as a total significant 
imity. It is endlessly busy collecting data. It is 
quite helpless when it faces the task of thinking 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

of all this data in complete and organized fash- 
ion. In saying all this we are not making an at- 
tack. We are simply describing a situation. If, 
as a result of this, life is ragged and fragmentary 
and confused, and a good many men are trying 
to play the game without having the slightest 
notion what it is all about, that is probably an 
inevitable by-product of the whole intellectual 
and ethical situation in which we find ourselves. 
We did not create it, but we can at least try to 
understand it. And we can try to find a way 
out of it. In such a time and in the tangle of 
such a set of experiences it is infinitely refresh- 
ing to come into the presence of a vigorous and 
buoyant mind alive to all contemporary currents, 
yet steadily preserving the passion for a total 
view of things, and rising from bits and frag- 
ments to a conception of life itself. Untold 
stimulus and inspiration come from contact with 
a mind which presses beyond the multitudinous 
details to the place where they meet and combine 
in organic unity and meaning. We have not been 
tempted to think of life as a tale told by an idiot 
and signifying nothing. We have been tempted 
to think of life as a tale told by a million experts 
no one of whom had related his knowledge to 
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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

that of the rest, with a resulting series of gaps 
and confusions which left the mind in complete 
bewilderment. We have plenty of pictures of 
particular hills and valleys. We have had no 
map of the whole country. And when, all weary 
with this endless array of photographs, we have 
come across a man who was trying to see life 
steadily and see it whole, the very sight of him 
has given us new courage. When such a man 
gives his life to systematic theology, and brings 
to its teaching rich and varied gifts of exposition, 
we may not agree with all his conclusions, but 
we are sure to find him stimulating and kindling. 
And we may find that he turns our attention to 
paths which offer very rich and satisfying re- 
wards. 

For eighteen years (1896-1914) Professor 
Olin Alfred Curtis occupied the chair of syste- 
matic theology in the Drew Theological Semin- 
ary. At an earlier period of his life for six years 
(1889-1895) he filled the same chair in Boston 
University School of Theology. Now that he is 
gone from us and it is possible to think of his 
whole career, there need be no hesitation in say- 
ing that he possessed a quite unrivaled power of 
making systematic theology a commanding and 

[123] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

vital matter in the lives of students. He de- 
clared once in his striking way that as it was said 
of Alexander Hamilton, that he touched the 
corpse of American credit and it sprang to its 
feet, so it ought to be said of the teacher of sys- 
tematic theology that he touched the corpse of 
doctrine and it sprang to its feet. Men in all 
parts of the world will testify, as they look back 
to the hours spent in Professor Curtis's class- 
rooms, that he did indeed make theology live. 
It will be worth our while, then, to look into the 
sources of this man's power and to see how it 
was that, at his lectures at least, the queen of 
the sciences once more arose and sat grandly on 
her throne. Such an achievement as his has sig- 
nificance which reaches beyond his own person- 
ality and beyond the men whom he touched. His 
secret ought not to be allowed to pass from the 
earth with him. 

I. MAKING THEOLOGY VIVID 

Professor Curtis had a mind of remorseless 

analytical power. It moved with a precision and 

a logical definiteness quite its own. He was a 

patient and industrious student, and he was will- 

[124] 



MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

ing to give years to obtaining a genuine mastery 
of the materials of his subject. He never sub- 
stituted a brilliant epigram for a careful process 
of investigation. You always knew that there 
was the most careful work back of his lectures. 
But he was vivid. He did make his words flash 
as if tipped with fire. He did find the phrase 
and the illustration capable of photographing 
themselves on the mind of the hearers. He al- 
ways added to his accuracy of statement a cer- 
tain energy which made his conceptions stand out 
as if they had been seen sharply against the sky. 
He once said that a preacher could get much doc- 
trine from the masters of theology, but he ought 
to get his style from the masters of literature. 
Professor Curtis himself was an omnivorous 
reader of the writings which may be described as 
essentially literature. The great poetry, lyric 
and dramatic, the great fiction, the great essays, 
he had on the tip of his tongue. His own sensi- 
tiveness to literary effects would have made him 
the creator of powerful and haunting phrases in 
any event. His intimate friendship with the 
writings of authors who used words like slaves 
had developed and increased this gift. Words 
came marching forth like well-equipped armies 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

at his command. There was no subtlety of the- 
ology too intricate for this gift of telling and 
glowing phrase. Before you went into his class 
you had probably been reading some stately and 
pretentious tome which moved with cumbersome 
dignity along the highways of a profound and 
difficult theme. Professor Curtis discussed the 
same theme. His resilient and glowing mind 
played with it, viewed it from all sorts of angles, 
let the light fall upon it in all sorts of ways. 
And as his lambent, telling words discussed it, 
by some curious magic it became a thing of living 
relationships. Ideas came to have individuality 
and new and holding interest as he discussed 
them. A fire was always burning in his mind, 
and the conceptions which he discussed always 
took to blazing, but were never consumed. His 
immediate grip on his classes came from the clear 
and luminous vividness of all his speech. 

II. MAKING THEOLOGY DRAMATIC 

John Milton was a systematic theologian who 

happened to put his theology into sonorous and 

splendor-lit verse. "Paradise Lost," although 

not a drama in form, is a drama in essence. The 

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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

material with which Milton dealt was the most 
dramatic in all the world. The material with 
which the theologian deals is of this same essen- 
tially dramatic character. When it is reduced to 
formal logic and expressed in mathematical form 
it ceases to be itself. It becomes a dead body. 
Professor Curtis's lectures were strikingly and 
powerfully dramatic. It was never that he placed 
the lights so as to produce an artificially dramatic 
situation. 'No man ever had a more austere sense 
of sincerity and candor in dealing with his ma- 
terials. But he knew life so deeply, he knew 
theology so profoundly, he knew the action of 
the living Christ upon the hearts of men so thor- 
oughly, that he understood that when you speak 
of these things truly you have to speak of them 
dramatically. Life is not static. It is in motion. 
Sin is belligerent. Virtue is in a suit of armor. 
The Son of God goes forth to war. Redemption 
is an achievement of the most tragic cost. The 
new hf e is a mighty adventure of the spirit. He 
could not reduce these things to platitudes of 
colorless correctness. They burned in his blood. 
They were at white heat in his brain. They ener- 
gized his will. And they were a summoning pas- 
sion in his voice. Theology, like Saint Paul, went 

[127] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

forth to fight with beasts at Ephesus. The am- 
phitheater was crowded. The wild beasts roared 
with fury. The battle was on. And every nerve 
tingled with the meaning of it all as you became 
a part of the fray. 

When you listened to Professor Curtis you saw 
every doctrine with all its tragic and glorious im- 
plications because you saw it as a reality affecting 
the character of men, and not merely as a postu- 
late forged in the study of a cloistered thinker. 
Once in a lecture he began speaking of hell. Now 
everybody who knows anything about the psy- 
chology of contemporary life knows that it is 
almost impossible to make hell authentic to the 
modern mind. Dante could write the first part 
of the "Divine Comedy" just because hell was 
ethically authentic to the Middle Ages. In one 
dramatic flash of thought Professor Curtis made 
the ethical connection he desired for his hearers. 
"Brethren," he said, "the awful thing about hell 
is not hell. It is that some men like hell." In 
an instant the artificial was brushed aside, and 
the essential tragedy of the man who becomes 
evil at the center of his life was sharp and terrible 
before the men who listened. 

The tragedy of sin and the tragic cost of re- 
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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

demption lived in his lectures until you might 
have felt that the spirit of a new iEschylus or 
a new Sophocles brooded back of his speech. The 
mastering and compelling thing about all this 
was its intense reality to Professor Curtis. He 
never tried to create feelings which he had not 
experienced. His own face was torn by a sad, 
terrible passion as he spoke, and his own face had 
a sudden glory in it as he sensed the victory of 
Calvary in all its tortured pain. He found hu- 
man experience terribly and gloriously dramatic. 
He found Christianity tragically and magnifi- 
cently dramatic. And the spell and the reality 
of his own experience laid hold upon the men who 
heard him speak. 

III. MAKING THEOLOGY HUMAN 

Jesus was perpetually finding theology in a 
farmer's fields, and eternal truth looking out 
from the floor when a busy woman was about 
household tasks. The amazement of the para- 
bles is just in their making the most recondite 
and far-reaching principles human. As a mat- 
ter of fact if you cannot put a truth into a story 
you have not fully mastered its significance for 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

your age. All trained students of Christian doc- 
trine know how it is especially true that syste- 
matic theology has a way of taking the bit in its 
teeth, going off at a gallop and leaving actual 
human experience quite out of sight. You watch 
it raising a cloud of dust in the distance and 
you feel as if you would never catch up with it. 
Now one of the most characteristic aspects of 
Professor Curtis's work was the way in which 
he made theology human. It might be the dif- 
ference between the law and the gospel which he 
wanted to make real. First he made you feel that 
living under the law was trying "to do the thing" 
yourself. Living under the gospel was going 
through the days by means of a great trust in 
Christ your Saviour. All this was clear, but it 
had not yet mastered your imagination or pressed 
into the heart of your experience. Then came 
one of his marvelous illustrations. You saw a 
father and a little daughter starting for a climb 
in the White Mountains. The daughter needed 
to learn that she could not meet either life or a 
mountain alone. The father allowed her to push 
on up the steep trails in her sturdy, proud, child's 
independence. She went bravely for a while. 
Then she began to stumble on the stones. 
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L - 



MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

Thorns cut through her stockings and hurt her 
cruelly. She fell as she climbed. Still she held 
to her purpose. She would show father that she 
could do it all alone. But at the last the trail 
and the mountain were too much for her. She 
gave up the endeavor. She turned with a cry 
to her father. His arms were waiting. They 
had been waiting all the while. He held her fast 
and helped her at every step, and together they 
went to the top of the mountain. So an abstract 
theological doctrine became an intimate human 
experience. And the very illustration which 
made the doctrine human interpreted its inner 
meaning. 

This sort of thing was all the while happening 
in Professor Curtis's class. He made every doc- 
trine human by interpreting it in the terms of 
actual human experience. And his illustrations 
still haunt the memory of ministers and mission- 
aries all over the world. 

IV, MAKING THEOLOGY COSMOPOLITAN 

Two keen young students in a certain univer- 
sity were once discussing life and religion. "The 
queer thing to me," said one of them, "is that 

[131] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

religion is so much smaller than life. You feel 
shut up in a church when you talk about re- 
ligion, and life is as big as all out of doors." 

**It's not religion that shuts you up indoors," 
replied the other; "it's somebody's notion of re- 
ligion. The real thing is as big as all out of 
doors and indoors. It includes everything there 
is." 

What the first lad expressed regarding religion 
many men have felt to be true of theology. 
Somehow it was smaller than life. Somehow it 
was sitting in a corner making microscopic syl- 
logisms while the big titanic movements of things 
went by unheeded. The theologian had a digni- 
fied and careful piece of work to do. But the 
rich and manifold and generous aspects of ex- 
perience hardly touched his carefully fenced in 
little spot in the intellectual life of the world. 
The lectures of Professor Curtis gave an im- 
pression quite the opposite of all this. To him 
systematic theology included everything else, and 
he made you feel that it included everything else. 
In his lectures it never smacked of the provincial. 
It was gloriously cosmopolitan. Perhaps in part 
this effect was produced by the range and rich- 
ness of Professor Curtis's culture quite outside 
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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

the technical materials of his own department. 
Professor Curtis was one of the best-read and 
one of the most widely read men in the Methodist 
Episcopal Church. English literature, as we 
have indicated, lived in his mind. The master- 
pieces of European literature were famihar to 
him. He believed that there is such a thing as 
American literature and he knew it as did few 
other men in America. He had the tastes of a 
humanist combined with the most intense inter- 
est in his own field and a brilliant command of 
its materials. As a result of all this his lectures 
glowed and gleamed with allusions as wide as 
the field of human letters. Then he was a great 
lover of nature, and he had, for instance, an in- 
terest in birds and a scientific habit of observing 
them which gave him a knowledge of some as- 
pects of bird life which passed that of the ama- 
teur. In outstanding aspects of science and art 
and music, and in odd and out-of-the-way knowl- 
edge regarding these things, he was always sur- 
prising you. Sometimes it seemed as if a friendly 
and genial encyclopedia had suddenly taken to 
teaching theology. He carried all his erudition 
and his variety of interests with light and firm 
step. His lectures were never overloaded with 

[133] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

references. It* was all natural and simple and 
spontaneous. And his bright gayety of spirit, 
his quick and telling humor gave a heartiness to 
his lectures which saved them from ever becom- 
ing pedantic. Deeper than this, he knew that 
theology must interpret all of life or it interprets 
none of life truly. He bravely accepted the chal- 
lenge implied in this situation, and his theology 
enlarged and expanded until, to paraphrase the 
Latin poet Terence, "all that concerned human- 
ity belonged to it." This sense of a message as 
large as the passionate activity of God and all 
the multitudinous activities of men became a 
part of the life of his students. Their own think- 
ing was saved from provinciality and became cos- 
mopolitan. 

v. FILLING THEOLOGY WITH MORAL URGENCY 

If Thomas Carlyle had never written words 
thundering with the storms on Mount Sinai Pro- 
fessor Curtis might have lived and taught, but he 
would not have been just the teacher who bent 
our minds and hearts in reverence before the 
splendors of the moral law. Carlyle's passion for 
reality, Carlyle's storm-tossed sense of the moral 
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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

meaning of life, Carlyle's rugged and terrible sin- 
cerity had entered into Dr. Curtis. It was a Car- 
lyle made into an evangelical Christian to whom 
we listened, but it was a Carlyle, for all that, 
trembling with the urgency of his moral passion. 
Dr. Curtis liked to talk of Immanuel Kant, and 
to him, as to Kant, the categorical imperative was 
not merely an idea, it was an experience. The 
might of the moral must seized and mastered 
him. If conscience did not make a coward of 
him it did make a theologian of him, for he ap- 
proached every theological problem through its 
relation to moral experience. It was here that 
he made one of his most far-reaching contribu- 
tions to the life of his students. He saw life as a 
great ethical adventure. Like the Pope, in "The 
Ring and the Book," he could say, *'Life is a pro- 
bation, and its business just the terrible choice." 
To listen to him was like hearing the "stern 
daughter of the voice of God" all over again. 

As he described man's passionate pilgrimage 
for peace, and told the tale of his tragic failure 
until he entered the way of trust, men came to 
live over again the deepest and most typical 
struggle in the hfe of humanity. With amazing 
versatihty he related his fundamental ethical con- 

[135] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

captions to all sorts of situations and to all sorts 
of human types. All his work was done with an 
impelling sense of that moral demand which is 
the deepest and most challenging experience in 
the life of men. 



VI. MAKING THEOLOGY THE EPIC OF THE 
SPIRITUAL LIFE 

Dante translated the theology of Thomas 
Aquinas into immortal poetry. Professor Cur- 
tis made his own theology into singing and rap- 
turous poetry for those who listened to his lec- 
tures. Many theologians, like Moliere's hero, 
have spoken prose all their lives without know- 
ing it. Professor Curtis spoke poetry without 
knowing it. It was not that he used rhythmic 
forms, though in passages of spiritual passion his 
lectures had a noble music whose very words had 
wings, but, deeper than this, his message was a 
journey which came to the homeland of the soul 
at last. And the spiritual serenity, the spiritual 
victory of Christianity as he interpreted it to men 
reached that height of vision which had all the 
glow and inspiration of rare and beautiful song. 
His Ulysses of the spirit journeyed long and far. 
[136] 



MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

But at last there was the homeland, the home of 
joy and peace forever more. The connection be- 
tween the stern and tragic moral passion of one 
aspect of his message and the glowing high peace 
of its consummation was in his own vivid experi- 
ence of the meaning of the person and work of 
Jesus Christ. Athanasius would have listened 
with kindled heart, could he have journeyed from 
the fourth century into ours, to the powerful ex- 
pression of the meaning of the divine Christ for 
human life which fell from the lips of this teacher. 
And all the resources of his mind, all the stern 
loyalty of his will, all the devotion of his heart, 
every outreach of his life met in his experience of 
the meaning of the Cross. It was not merely a 
doctrine. It was the very life of his spirit. Be- 
cause the very Son of God died for him he had 
found his way into the wonder of the peace in- 
effable, and knew how to point others to that 
home of the spirit.* 

VII. MAKING THEOLOGY DYNAMIC 

Is there something more to say? Principally 
this: Dr. Curtis's lectm-es demanded more than 

•See the brilliant volume "The Christian Faith" by Olin 
Alfred Curtis. 

[137] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

hearers. They released energies which had to 
be put into action. Men sometimes disagreed 
with the particular interpretations which came 
flashing forth from his masterful brain. What 
they received in any case was a mental and moral 
and spiritual stimulus which set them moving 
with new and powerful momentum. Dr. Curtis 
helped men to have courage to disagree, even 
where he was masterful with the dogmatism of a 
terrible earnestness, and at the very moment he 
roused in them a passion for truth, a sense of the 
meaning of religion, a consciousness of the high 
commanding power of Christ, which sent them 
forth with a new light in their eyes and a new 
purpose in their hearts. He kept hanging where 
many a student saw them the words of Paul: 
"Not that we have lordship over your faith, but 
we are helpers of your joy." He wanted to be 
a man's master only in the sense of helping him 
to attain the power of a masterful and adequate 
use of his own powers. 

We sat in his room watching the play of that 
rare mind, feeling the richness of that spirit, and 
then, as he most desired, forgetting him in the 
sense of the winsome friendliness and the high 
majesty of the One whom he served. He was 
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MAKING THEOLOGY LIVE 

contented to be a theological John the Baptist, 
pointing men to the Christ who — none knew bet- 
ter than he — must reveal his own greatest secrets 
to the men who were to be his ministers. So, 
somehow, again and again it happened that be- 
fore the lecture was over, the slight, tense figure 
of our professor seemed to have slipped away 
and a presence august and summoning had en- 
tered the doorway of our lives. "I must decrease, 
but He must increase" was the very desire of the 
teacher who wanted the best and richest things 
for his boys. We are not asking now the place 
of his theology among the various interpretations 
of the faith, we are contented to remember how 
he made Christianity regal in our thought, and 
made us eager that that vision should pass out 
to other lives. In this fine and high sense he was 
our master in the things of Christ. In this nota- 
ble and far-reaching fashion he was our teacher 
in the things of God. 



[139] 



VII 
DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

MR. H. G. WELLS in his brilliant "Out- 
line of History" refers to Dante once, and 
that reference is in a footnote. There may be 
two reasons for this scant consideration of the 
great Italian. In the first place Mr. Wells de- 
spises mysticism and all its works. He does not 
believe in a light "never seen on sea or land." He 
spends all his time discussing the kinds of lights 
and shadows which have been seen on various 
seas and lands. He has the urbane and conclu- 
sive clarity of the man who mistakes his own 
color blindness for intellectual emancipation. So 
the mystic poet of the "Inferno," the "Purga- 
torio," and the "Paradiso" simply does not come 
within his ken. In the second place he probably 
does not realize the significance of Dante's prose 
work "De Monarchia" in relation to the whole 
theory of the Holy Roman Empire and in a 
larger way in relation to the very idea of the uni- 
fying of the life of the world. A somewhat com- 
[140] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

pleter knowledge of the medieval period would 
doubtless have led him to treat Dante's "De 
Monarchia" in the same way in which he refers 
to Augustine's "De Civitate Dei." When the 
"Outline of History" is written which is char- 
acterized by ample erudition as well as alertness 
of mind and pungency of expression it is safe to 
say that Dante will have a place corresponding 
to his significance. 

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in the 
year 1265. He died in exile in the year 1321. 
So that really Dante belonged to two centuries 
and not to one. He saw the great unity of the 
thirteenth century. He saw the beginnings of 
the disintegration of the fourteenth century. 
But he himself was a child of the thirteenth cen- 
tury. No one entered into its life more deeply, 
and no one interpreted it more profoundly. 

The ancient period had seen the emerging of 
the great ideas which were to influence the world. 
The ancient empires had written the power of 
organized force deeply in the mind of man. 
Greece had celebrated the emancipation of the 
curious mind. Rome had illustrated the potency 
of the practical will. Israel had spoken for the 
illuminated conscience. The dream of beauty, 

[141] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

the dream of order, and the dream of righteous- 
ness had claimed the imagination of mankind. 
And each in a measure had ceased to be a dream 
and had become an achievement. In Christian- 
ity there were principles capable of working out 
a notable synthesis of these ideas. The ideas of 
force and beauty and righteousness and order 
met in a noble harmony in the teachings of Jesus. 
But the reaction of the clean Christian conscience 
from the coarser and more physical aspects of 
Greek thought and the battle between the wor- 
ship of the Roman Emperor and the worship of 
Christ produced an antagonism which hid from 
view this deeper unity. And the rise of mon- 
asticism gave to Christianity a form of expres- 
sion based upon the renunciation of the world 
and not its transformation in the name of the 
principles of Jesus. Then the Barbarians swept 
in and civilization itself collapsed. 

But Christianity could not after all escape its 
task of mastering and transforming the life of 
the world. The religion of Jesus did tame the 
Barbarians. It did preside at the founding and 
the building up of the civilization of Western 
Europe which was to be the typical civilization 
of the modern world. And gradually the old 
[142] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

dreams emerged. When Charlemagne was 
crowned Roman Emperor in 800 A. D. the 
Roman dream of world order was brought into 
men's minds again. It was to be an order using 
force for noble ends. But in the mind of the 
Pope at least as he put the crown upon the head 
of the gseat Frankish king it was to be an order 
bent to the purposes of the Holy Catholic 
Church. 

So the fundamental ideas of the Middle Ages 
began to take form. The world was one world. 
Its political head was the Emperor. Its religious 
head was the Pope. Together they were to main- 
tain the peace and harmony and right thinking 
and right living of mankind. A conflict was in- 
evitable. The two heads of the world did not 
happily adjust themselves to each other. Strong 
emperors dominated weak popes. Strong popes 
dominated weak emperors. And when a strong 
pope and a strong emperor met they fought for 
supremacy. In the eleventh century we see Hil- 
debrand and Henry IV in conflict. In the thir- 
teenth century we watch the struggle between a 
series of popes and Frederick II. The dream of 
unity is disrupting the life of the world. This 
struggle between popes and emperors related it- 

[143] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

self in all sorts of ways to the life of the eleventh 
and twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In Italy 
by a process we need not stop to analyze the fol- 
lowers of the Papal party came to be called 
Guelfs and the followers of the Imperial party 
came to be called Ghibellines. The thirteenth 
century saw such an achievement of unity based 
upon the life of the church as Europe had not 
known before and was not to know again. In- 
nocent III represents the consummate achieve- 
ment of Papal supremacy. In the same period 
the intellectual life of the church comes to full 
flower in that great masterpiece, the "Summa" of 
Thomas Aquinas. And in the same wonderful 
time the piety of the church finds its most noble 
and appeahng expression in the life and influence 
of Saint Francis of Assisi. The spirit of the time 
found memorable and exquisite expression in the 
aspiring grandeur of Gothic architecture. No 
wonder that to this day Roman Catholics are in- 
clined to call the thirteenth the most wonderful 
of centuries. It was their Augustan age. And 
it is interesting that a certain type of decadent 
American intellectual has looked back wistfully 
to this very time. Henry Adams wrote "Mont 
Saint Michel and Chartres" as a study in thir- 
[144] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

teenth-centuiy unity even as the "Education of 
Henry Adams" was a study of twentieth-century 
multiplicity. 

Amid the break-up of these thirteenth-cen- 
tury unities Dante lived and wrote. He inter- 
preted them with exquisite beauty. And he had 
his own dream of unity to express. It is not too 
much to say that in him the organic tendencies 
of the mind of the Middle Ages found supreme 
expression. Let us now look at the man and 
his activities and his thoughts and dreams. 

I. THE MAN. NATimE AND ENVIRONMENT AND 
HEREDITY DID MUCH FOR DANTE 

His family and its traditions gave him access 
to the best his city offered. That city was itself 
a mother of his mind and spirit. The bitterest 
words Dante writes of Florence in his days of 
exile have the terrible pain which only comes 
when love itself has become tragic wrath. From 
no other city would Dante accept the poet's 
crown. Florence was in his heart even when 
he could not walk upon its streets. And the 
eager youth who lived his boyhood in this won- 
derful town possessed a nature of the most deli- 

[145] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

cate and sympathetic responsiveness to every 
suggestion. He was an artist in the very fiber 
of him. He was a poet with all the palpitating 
wonder of a poet's fancies. He was a student 
and he became a man of the profoundest erudi- 
tion. His mind became a mirror in which the 
intellectual life of a thousand years saw itself 
reflected. He had an inner gentleness all full 
of winsome charm. He had a stern strength and 
under the weight of exile and suffering his very 
face took on an expression full of dark mystery. 
You could believe as you looked upon him that 
he had been in hell. He had fierce and bewilder- 
ing struggles in his own spirit and with hostile 
circumstance. More and more he was victorious 
within even as he was defeated without. If he 
could not control events he could become a man 
of towering spiritual grandeur in spite of events. 
He had that lonely splendor of spirit which comes 
to a man who climbs heights of thought rarely 
attained, and plumbs depths of experience whose 
meaning men rarely dare to face. He was so 
many sided that it is easy to see one part of his life 
and fancy that one has understood him. The tra- 
dition of Dante suggests an appearance of abys- 
mal gloom. But the reader of his great master- 
[146] 



BANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

piece observes how often he describes the coming 
of a smile upon the face of the one who is leading 
Dante. And the consummation of all his thought 
is that triumph of love whose music is the final 
victory of goodness in the world. He was proud. 
He could be scornful. He knew how to hate. 
He had a confidence in his own powers which 
only the most consummate genius could justify. 
But he also had a remorseless moral honesty. He 
does not spare himself as he describes the forces 
of moral discipline. And he bent beneath the 
lash of his own fiercely candid speech. He knew 
the wonder of forgiveness as a personal experi- 
ence, and there were great depths of humility 
under all his pride. 

II. THE POET 

Dante belonged to a group of artistic young 
intellectuals who aspired to give finely beautiful 
expression to their thoughts. The wonderfully 
delicate and sweet love songs of Southern France 
had come into Italy and such songs as these 
Dante wrote with wonderful grace and charm. 
But it is to be observed that in him the love song 
moved toward a high and stainless beauty which 

[147] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

did not always characterize that type of singing. 
Such verse may be the flower of something lower 
or the symbol of something higher. To Dante 
the summons of gracious and impalpable ideals 
more and more expresses itself in poetry which 
moved from the fair form up to the sense of in- 
visible goodness and wisdom. He had a sense 
of the melody and music of his own tongue which 
was something new in Italy. And it may ahnost 
be said that he gave a new and wonderful lan- 
guage to Europe. What Luther did at a later 
time for the German Dante did for the Italian 
speech. It is a matter of the utmost significance 
that this scholar chose his own tongue instead of 
the universal Latin as the vehicle for his writing. 
Had his great poem been written in Latin it 
would have spoken to a worldwide aristocracy of 
scholars. As it was written in his native tongue 
it had a democratic appeal which made it an ele- 
ment in the creation of Italy. For in the "Di- 
vine Comedy" Italy is not indeed a geographical 
expression. It is a spiritual reality. 

The "Divina Commedia" is the consummate 
achievement of the genius of Dante. "The 
Bishop of Ripon, Boyd Carpenter, says diffi- 
dently as becomes a man who speaks with au- 
[148] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

thority, that although Dante is not the greatest 
poet, yet the 'Divine Comedy' is the greatest 
poem we possess." (Henry D wight Sedgwick, 
Dante.) Dr. George Santayana declares in 
his stimulating volume, "Three Philosophical 
Poets": "Here then we have the most com- 
plete idealization and comprehension of things 
achieved by mankind hitherto. Dante is the type 
of a consummate poet." The "Divine Comedy" 
has had a most extraordinary circulation. Dr. 
Washington Gladden, who in his busy life found 
time to develop a genuine interest in Dante, in- 
forms us in the lecture on Dante the Poet in his 
"Witnesses of the Light," that "The sixteenth 
century saw twenty-one editions of this poem ; the 
seventeenth forty-two ; the eighteenth four ; . . .^ 
A historian who counted the translations in 1843 
reported nineteen in Latin, twenty-four French, 
twenty English, twenty German, two Spanish." 
Men of spiritual insight have interpreted the 
meaning of the poem in these deeper relations, as 
when Bishop William Boyd Carpenter lectured 
at Harvard on "The Spiritual Message of 
Dante." There has been a real interest in the 
great poem and its author in America, and at 
last, in the "Life of Dante," by Charles Allen 

[149] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

f 
Dinsmore, the New World has contributed a 

notable biography to the Dante literature. 

Superficial men in a superficial age are likely 
to ignore the great poem. But whenever the hu- 
man spirit casts deep and wistful eyes into the 
mystery of the meaning of its own moral and 
spiritual struggles there is a new interest in the 
"Divine Comedy." The conception of the poem 
is startling in its audacity. Accepting the whole 
theology of his period, especially as it had been 
expressed by Thomas Aquinas, Dante sets out 
to portray the journey of a living man through 
Hell and Purgatory and Heaven. Virgil escorts 
the poet through Hell and Purgatory, and his 
lady love, Beatrice, escorts him through Heaven. 
Indeed, the whole journey is an experience made 
possible by the glorious Beatrice, who in Heaven 
plans for the rescue of her erstwhile lover caught 
in the meshes and confusions of the world. The 
poem is a singular combination of poetry and 
mathematics. You have a detailed and syste- 
matic account of each region which suggests 
scientific description after measurement. The 
poet really sees everything he describes and this 
gives the description a curious vividness. It is 
no part of our purpose to give a detailed account 
[150] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

of the great poem. The reader who has not yet 
made its acquaintance will do well to begin with 
Professor Alfred M. Brooks's, "Dante — How to 
Know Him," and then to get into such a trans- 
lation as the melodious rendering of Longfellow. 
We have here very great poetry all lighted with 
the glowing fires of a vital imagination. The 
whole experience of man is laid under tribute. 
All the hope and fear and struggle, the goodness 
and the sinning of the race find typical expres- 
sion somewhere in the colossal poem. It is kept 
human b}^ the sure and graphic pictures of peo- 
ple and tilings and places. It sweeps along to the 
momentum of exquisite music. It is ripe with 
the profoundest thought which had come from 
the mind of man up to the time when Dante lived. 
It is the supreme utterance of the mind of the 
Middle Ages. It is the complete expression of 
the conscience of the Middle Ages. And it 
pours out the very passion and pain of the spir- 
itual aspiration of the human heart. Hell is an 
unflinching account of the relation between sin 
and punishment. And in the most marvelous 
way the punishment expresses, indeed grows out 
of the very nature of the sin. Purgatory is the 
tale of that disciphne which cleanses the soul. 

[151] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

And here again there is a subtle and amazing un- 
derstanding of the nature of the disease of evil 
and the necessary aspects of that moral experi- 
ence which is its cure. Heaven is a picture of 
realization. Here we have perfect light, perfect 
music, and perfect love. And the marvel of the 
achievement of Dante lies in the fact that he does 
succeed in piling glory upon glory until the per- 
fect rose of Heaven's fulfillment blooms in all its 
wonder before the awed and enraptured gaze of 
the reader. To plan such a poem was an act of 
unparalleled moral and intellectual daring. To 
achieve such a creation is to step into the ranks 
of the greatest sons of earth. 

III. THE STATESMAN 

The Italian cities of the Middle Ages have a 
place all their own in history. And Florence is 
typical of their splendor and of their degrada- 
tion. While popes and emperors were disputing 
about the mastery of the world, these towns 
reached their own extraordinary place of con- 
spicuous eminence. The towns themselves were 
torn by internal feuds and were worn by fighting 
each other. And all the while within their boun- 
[152] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

daries the mind of man glowed and gleamed with 
light and power. It was inevitable that in such 
a city Dante should dream of stabiUty and unity. 
It was inevitable that in such a land Dante should 
dream of a nobler order. He had practical abili- 
ties as well as far-flung powers of mind and he 
came to be one of the outstanding men in the 
political life of the city. But the very largeness 
of his views and his very honesty and impartial- 
ity were against him at last. In his absence upon 
most important political business he was exiled. 
He never saw Florence again. And in his life 
as a wanderer he meditated deeply upon the 
w^hole series of problems involved in the political 
organization of the world. Torn and confused 
Italy was in his mind and his heart all the while 
as he carried on these profound meditations upon 
the structure of society. The results of all his 
thinking were formulated in that famous work 
"De Monarchia." First and foremost of all he 
believed in the unity of the world. It was one 
world. And all the hideous conflicts which dis- 
integrated its life must be brought to an end in 
an organization which would give it justice and 
peace. The one world must be the visible ex- 
pression of the mastery of the kingdom of God. 

[153] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

But the pope was not to be its secular head. 
Dante emerged from his profoundest thinking 
not a Guelf but a Ghibelhne. He believed in 
the two swords. The pope was to carry the 
sword of spiritual power. The emperor was to 
carry the sword of secular power. And these 
two together were to guide the world. Dante 
was a fearless critic of actual popes. As we see 
in the Inferno he was perfectly willing to con- 
sign a pope to Hell. The hope of Italy in his 
mind was an emperor who would deliver the 
country from its own dissensions and give it or- 
ganization and unity and peace. The supreme 
disappointment of his life was the death of the 
emperor upon whom he had fastened all his 
hopes. For with that death the dream passed 
from the realm of history as far as practical pos- 
sibility of its fulfillment was concerned. It was 
still an important factor in men's thinking. But 
it became farther and farther removed from the 
world of facts. It became more and more an 
element in that world of ideas apart from the 
dominant achievements of men. France was be- 
coming a great nation. England was on the sure 
path of nationality. And a world of nations 
rather than a world of one great organization 
[154] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

came to be the practical thought in the minds 
of men. The pope became practically a captive 
of the French king. The great dream of unity 
both in its papal interpretation and in its im- 
perial interpretation collapsed. 

And yet we are not able to forget Dante's 
interpretation of the great thought of world or- 
ganization. His hatred of war, his enthusiasm 
for a wise and orderly life for mankind, and his 
belief in an authority which should master the 
injustice and lawlessness of men hover before 
our minds to-day with their colors still bright 
as the ideals which captured his own imagina- 
tion and won his heart. The thought of an im- 
perial organization of the world has been in the 
mind of many a leader. It dazzled the imagina- 
tion of Napoleon. It moved like quicksilver in 
the thought of that Emperor of Germany whose 
house went down in the blood and fury of the 
war which has just closed. So for good and for 
evil the conception of world unity has contin- 
ued to seek a place in men's minds. President 
Wilson became its prophet in a particularly noble 
form. And men of good will are sure that it 
must rise from the apathy of these degenerate 
days. The form in which Dante expressed the 

[155] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 



idea of the oneness of the world was temporary. 
The essence of the idea is permanent. 



IV. THE PHILOSOPHER 

It may be said that with Dante feeling was 
more fundamental than thinking. But it was 
never feeling as a substitute for thought. It 
was always thought at a white heat of realiza- 
tion. His poetry was philosophy set on fire and 
burning without being consumed. And the fire 
burned with a wonderful accompaniment of noble 
music. Dante lived in a world where Plato had 
measured the appearance in the terms of an ideal 
reality. He lived in a world where Aristotle had 
applied his genius to classification. He lived in 
a world where Thomas Aquinas had turned the 
philosophy of Aristotle into a Christian view of 
God and the world. As Dr. Santayana has sug- 
gested, the heart of all this was a view of every- 
thing as seen from the position of the dominance 
of the moral and spiritual meaning. All causes 
became fmal causes. The whole view of the 
world became teleological. The forms of his 
thinking contain much which is foreign to us. 
Even as his science is that of a prescientific age, 
[156] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

SO his philosophy has the marks of the limitations 
of his period. But it is worth noting that his in- 
stincts were almost always sound and sure. His 
universe is a notable personal organism before 
the days of personalism. He organized all his 
thinking about the conceptions of moral and spir- 
itual responsibility. And he built all the sepa- 
rate elements of his world into a noble unity of 
conception. He had a passion for totality like 
that of Hegel at a later time. Here again the 
essential in his thinking is in sharp contrast with 
many of the thought forms in which he expresses 
it. No man ever tried more loftily to see life 
steadily and to see it whole. 

V. THE CHRISTIAN 

There is an almost amazing sense in which the 
"Divinia Commedia" is a spiritual autobiogra- 
phy. You not only come to know the Middle 
Ages as you never knew them. You come to 
know the very inmost and secret places of 
Dante's spirit. From the time when he is lost in 
the confusions of middle life with wild beasts 
of temptation ready to devour him, on through 
the moral revelations of the Inferno and the 

[157] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

stern and mastering yet hopeful disciplines of 
the Purgatorio, the glorious fulfillments of the 
Paradiso, it is the soul of Dante which is in the 
very center of your thought. And it is the soul 
of Dante as representing the typical struggles 
and failures and triumphs which come at last 
in the experience of the human spirit to Chris- 
tian victory. When Dante passes through the 
fire in the Purgatorio you have an almost physi- 
cal sense of the reality of the experience. Here 
again it is all expressed in the thought forms of 
the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. Dante is 
no revolutionist breaking up the old conceptions. 
He accepts them heartily. Eut again and again 
he accepts them in a fashion which almost re- 
creates them. He has a sure instinct for the 
moral sanction. And he has a firm sense of spir- 
itual reality. So here again the eternal finds 
valid expression in the forms of the temporal. 
We easily brush aside the inadequate form. 
Dante himself is so clear in his vision of the eter- 
nal reality. 

And an unutterably lofty place it is which 

Dante assigns to the religion which he interprets. 

Christianity is the source of everything and the 

goal of everjrthing. It is not an incident. It is 

[158] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

the one essential, all-mastering matter in hmnan 
experience even as it is the ultimate reality of 
the universe itself. And all this is a matter of 
the most intimate personal experience with the 
poet. Christianity is bone of his bone, flesh of 
his flesh, life of his life. It is the final and com- 
plete actuality which uplifts and sustains and in- 
spires his spirit. It is a personal dehverance 
and an eternal victory. 

VI. THE THEOLOGIAN 

Theology was everywhere recognized as the 
queen of the sciences when Dante wrote. Bea- 
trice herself has been interpreted as a symbol of 
theology. She was more than that, but what she 
was included that. As Virgil represents human 
reason, so Beatrice represents that full vision of 
truth which comes with revelation. The vision 
of Christian truth is itself a defining part of the 
felicity of heaven to Dante. The loving enjoy- 
ment of truth is a rapture the very thought of 
which kindled his mind. His theology is the 
thinking of Thomas Aquinas set to music. And 
in the process it has become the rapture of a 
spirit finding fulfillment in the realms of perfect 

[159] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

light. It is easy to find defects in Dante's theo- 
logical thinking, but here again it is his spirit 
and his ultimate goal which matter most. He be- 
lieves in truth alive, truth dominant, and truth 
eternal. That complete and unifying truth is in 
the reality of the life of God and his actual rela- 
tions to men. Christ has the historic place in 
his thinking. Mary holds the position given to 
her by the piety of the Middle Ages. And the 
conceptions of personality, of responsibihty, of 
forgiveness and of the new life are glowing with 
an understanding which cannot be limited by the 
character of any one century. The apotheosis of 
loving righteousness carries its own message of 
satisfaction age after age. 

The thirteenth century, as we have seen, saw a 
certain unity built about the church. The age 
of Innocent III and Thomas Aquinas and Saint 
Francis was in truth an amazing time of churchly 
achievement. And in one way it may be said that 
Dante at the beginning of the fourteenth century 
gave the final expression to this unity. The "Di- 
vina Commedia" was a Gothic cathedral in words. 
But looking more deeply we have already seen 
that Dante dreamed of another unity, a unity 
built about the state and depending upon a great 
[160] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

emperor. And this dream he saw in very process 
of falling in fragments at his feet. For the four- 
teenth century was a century of disintegration. 
The papal captivity at Avignon, the great 
schism, the growth of national feeling, the rise 
of new mental habits and new methods of ob- 
taining moral sanctions, marked the falling of 
that edifice which had towered so potently in the 
world of men. Petrarch has been called the first 
modern man. In a sense Dante may be called 
the last man of the Middle Ages. The break-up 
became a completer disintegration. The Renais- 
sance and the Reformation enriched the world, 
but they did not unify it. Modern science unified 
the impersonal aspects of experience and has lost 
a good deal of time trying to translate personal 
activities into impersonal terms. Economic and 
social movements have possessed their own thrill. 
As yet they have given unity to groups rather 
than to the total of life. So the modern man 
in a divided societj^ looks back with a certain 
astonishment to the completeness, the harmony, 
and the unity of Dante's view of life. 

We have already referred to Dante's limita- 
tions. He was a scholastic in method of think- 
ing; he did not possess that originality which cuts 

[161] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

to the heart of contemporary superstitions of the 
mind and the conscience and the heart. He was 
more interested in conservation than in the re- 
making of social relationships. He belongs to 
the great group of men who would stabilize the 
life of society. Such a position has its great 
strength as well as its weakness. Personality and 
righteousness and responsibility, the ethical 
struggle, the sternness of the law which makes 
evil produce evil, the glory of forgiveness, and 
the ultimate triumph of the righteous love of 
God have received supremely memorable expres- 
sion in the writings of Dante. If there are any 
literary immortals he is one of them. 

And Dante has his words of power to speak to 
the twentieth century. We, too, dream wistfully 
of unity in an age when the sanctions of life seem 
to be breaking all about us. We, too, hear the 
still and poignant voice of the inner life calling 
amid the confusions of the world. We, too, 
would reassure our own minds as to the eternal 
validities of righteousness in the midst of a dis- 
integrating age. We, too, wait for the fresh 
vision of God in the midst of the turbulence of a 
time whose life seems a denial of His existence. 
We, too, may find serenity and hope and confi- 
[162] 



DANTE AND HIS CENTURY 

dent belief in the future as we find our own au- 
thentic contact with the truths which do not die 
and the Personality who is at once life's source 
and life's consummation. 



[163] 



VIII 
THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN 

T was in Edinburgh on November 10, 1918. 
And that you will remember was the day 
before the signing of the armistice. I was speak- 
ing in Free St. George's that night, and I 
lunched with the minister of that famous preach- 
ing place and spent most of the afternoon in his 
study. The marks of his hard war experience 
were upon him. He had given himself with com- 
plete abandon both at the western front and in 
moving like a flaming evangel over America in- 
terpreting the cause of the Allies. One could see 
that he had given of his very blood. No wonder 
he was decorated as an officer of the British Em- 
pire. We sat by the fire in his study this Novem- 
ber afternoon and talked of all sorts of things. 
There were the theological subjects which allure 
any man with a drop of Scottish blood, there were 
literary matters which caused his eyes to flash, 
there was that passion for social betterment 
which blazed in his heart and was ready to leap 
[164] 



THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN 

from his lips, and all the while there was the swift 
play of a mind resilient and amazingly vital. 
The personal fascination of the man, with his 
extraordinary secrets of charm, has been felt by 
all who have approached him in any near or inti- 
mate way. In his own personality he has great 
wealth. And he gives opulently to his friends. 

The next time I saw him was in New York 
City. And now he was the minister at Fifth 
Avenue Presbyterian church and really belonged 
to us in America. Edinburgh could not cease 
from loving him, but confessedly found it hard 
to forgive him for leaving the Athens of the 
North. And the hundreds of unchurched young 
men, many of them intellectuals of wonderfully 
fertile mind, who had crowded to the Sunday 
night meetings which he mastered so easily and 
so notably for so many years, felt a curious lone- 
liness as if some shining brightness had been 
taken from their lives. He had brought them 
the fresh and untamed manhood which had 
caught some of the sweep of the lonely life in 
the open which he had known far from the great 
capitals of the world. He had spoken to them 
in words with all the witchery learned through 
his own sitting at the feet of masters of English 

[165] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

expression, and edged with the fine cutting power 
of his own mind. He had spoken to them with 
the voice of a man who looked at hfe without 
fear and without deception and spoke an honest 
and a fearless word. Now he had made the great 
adventure of giving himself to the metropolis of 
a new land, dizzy with the momentum of its own 
life, yet vaguely eager for some invisible treasure 
it was quite unable to define, 

CONTRAST WITH JOWETT 

Dr. Kelman had succeeded a great interpreter 
of all the delicate and gracious things of the inner 
life. To listen to Dr. Jowett was to stand in a 
garden with lilies of the valley blooming all about 
you. The infinite serenity of a life hved where 
the fountains of the spirit play was all about his 
words. He was a great artist, and his simplest 
sentences had the silken beauty given to the 
speech of a man who matches the gossamer 
grace of the life of the spirit with words which 
are poised on gentle and transparent wings. He 
produced an atmosphere all exquisite with rest, 
and the weary man of business and the disillu- 
sioned worldling felt a certain authentic sum- 
[166] 



THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN 

mons to repose in the very qualities of his speech. 
He was everything that New York was not. And 
he kept the soft and tender hghts of the spirit 
burning in a town where there was much dark- 
ness. 

All those who knew Dr. Kelman understood 
very well that he would not be content simply to 
succeed to this tradition. He would make a tra- 
dition of his own. He had already made a tra- 
dition of his own in Edinburgh. And in making 
it he had made himself one of the most command- 
ing preachers in the British Empire. His virile, 
versatile spirit, tasting life with infinite under- 
standing and with infinite relish, at once gave a 
new quality and a new tang to the pulpit of the 
great church. He proved worthy of a great past 
by an easy emancipation from any aspect of its 
life which would have made less potent the im- 
pact of his own ample message. 

Dr. Kelman is an amazing pastor. And he 
brings all his genius for friendship to his pastoral 
work. Few churches know the fine art of the 
pastoral relation as he reveals it. And the hearty 
and eager gift of himself turns the art into a 
human passion. He combines urbanity and the 
most gracious willingness to please with a steel- 

[167] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

like firmness in matters which are of deep and 
real importance. Already he has made himself 
in a fine and nobly masterful sense the leader of 
his church. There is nothing hard or rigid about 
his leadership. But it is simply that sort of lead- 
ership you cannot resist. 

WHAT KELMAN IS ABOUT 

And what is it which he brings to New York 
and to America? What is John Kelman really 
about? The answer has genuine importance to 
us all and should be given with care and as much 
discerning insight as one can bring to the task. 

Perhaps you remember the day when you first 
read Shorthouse's notable novel, "John Ingle- 
sant." You had been full of the stern and heroic 
Puritan tradition. You had felt the Hebrew 
passion for righteousness as it has poured itself 
out in so much of our Protestant life. Then you 
turned to that fascinating interpretation of the 
Cavalier spirit. Here you found a love of right- 
eousness which was also a love of beauty. Here 
you found good morals and good taste wedded in 
a gracious and memorable wedlock. And per- 
haps for the first time you really understood how 
[168] 



THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN 

the bare and naked nobility of religion may have 
garments all full of haunting beauty. It may be 
that from "John Inglesant" you passed to 
Walter Pater's "Marius the Epicurean." Here 
again you found the passion for serenity, the love 
of grace and charm, the gladness in beauty 
touched and mastered by the great Christian 
sanctions. If you did read thus and if you did 
think thus you were preparing to understand 
John Kehnan. When Matthew Arnold died 
some one said, *' There goes our last Greek." In 
a very notable sense Dr. Kelman is a Christian 
who has kept the lights of Hellas burning on his 
Christian shrine. 

It is not surprising to one who understands all 
this that he wrote with such appreciation of 
"Marius the Epicurean" in one of his books. It 
is not surprising that he wrote what a great 
critic called the first book in which Robert Louis 
Stevenson ever lived. The passionate virility of 
Stevenson, and his perfect gladness in the 
words which had a grace and charm and lucid 
power which men could not forget — all this was 
sure to master the mind of a spirit so sensitive 
and responsive as that of John Kehnan. ^Vhen 
in one of his brilliant lectures Dr. Kelman de- 

[169] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

scribes the fashion in which Carlyle gave voice 
to the Hebrew spirit in the nineteenth century 
and Matthew Arnold gave voice to the Greek 
spirit and in a high and commanding sense 
Robert Browning harmonized the two, we are 
really hearing the autobiography of the lecturer. 
He too has felt the conflict. He too has found 
a way of harmony. And in his voice the passion 
for righteousness and the passion for beauty 
speak together. 

A HUMANIST 

Thus it is true that in a very important sense 
he is a humanist speaking in a nation which needs 
to hear the voice of a Christian humanist almost 
more than it needs anything else. It is all very 
practical. The readers of the Yale lectures will 
see what a sure and steady mind Dr. Kelman 
brings to the problems of the maker of sermons 
and the guide of men. It is all lighted by a 
power of expression which has its own capacity 
for finding the right word and the gripping 
phrase and the sentence with lights burning all 
through the words. The book, "Things Eternal," 
is ripe with human experience, notable for felic- 
[170] 



THE GENIUS OF JOHN KELMAN 

ity of form and always the expression of a spirit 
honest in facing ugly facts and glowing in its 
faith in the eternal meaning of good facts. 

Dr. Kelman's mind thinks in ever enlarging 
ranges of interest. His Mendenhall lectures on 
International Christianity reveal that eager 
search which will only be contented when the 
farthest implications of the gospel have been 
realized. He is a modern in the sense that every 
vital thing in contemporary thought is moving 
in his blood. But he is a man of many ages, for 
the past is always ringing low beautiful bells in 
his mind and he will never forget its meaning or 
its beauty or its charm. He is alive with social 
passion, and he will make it commandingly ar- 
ticulate in his great pulpit. He also knows the 
perpetual and ultimate mystery of the individual, 
and he will make the glory and the wonder of 
that mystery shine before the minds of men. 

It is not too much to believe that he comes 
when the great metropolis most needs him. And 
it is equally true that he comes when America 
profoundly needs the word he has to say. He 
has traveled widely in America. He under- 
stands its spirit. He knows the potential far- 
sweeping meaning of the Mississippi Valley. 

[mi 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

And he believes in the nation with whose des- 
tinies he has cast his lot. New York has many 
an appeal to the visitor from the Middle West 
and the Pacific slope. It offers no opportunity 
more fertile in meaning than that which comes to 
the man who listens to this prophet of the beauty 
which is righteousness and the righteousness 
which is beauty. In his mind many rivers which 
have flowed separately meet and move together 
toward the great sea. 



[172] 



IX 

AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND 

A COLLECTION of poems by that human 
■^^^ and poignant singer, John Greenleaf 
Whittier, pubhshed in 1863, contains these lines: 

"O Englishmen ! — in hope and creed. 
In blood and tongue our brothers ! 
We too are heirs of Runnymede; 
And Shakespeare's fame and Cromweirs deed 
Are not alone our mother's. 

*' 'Thicker than water' in one rill 
Through centuries of story 
Our Saxon blood has flowed, and still 
We share with you its good and ill. 
The shadow and the glory. 

"Joint heirs and kinfolk, leagues of wave 
Nor length of years can part us; 
Your right is ours to shrine and grave. 
Your common freehold of the brave, 
The gift of saints and martyrs." 

The truth of the matter is that the tie between 
America and England is so intimate and strong 
that it is difficult to find words in which ade- 

[173] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

quately to express it, and yet an American can 
not use words at all without expressing it uncon- 
sciously. When we find noble phrases in which 
to express eager admiration, we must find them 
dripping with centuries of English enthusiasm 
and built out of words carved through centuries 
of English experience. When we seek for hard 
and biting sentences, quick with the quality of 
vigorous indignation, we must find our way in 
the old English speech, selecting words which 
have been the vehicle of England's wrath through 
many a generation. The grave and haunting 
splendor of the Miltonic line has taught us of 
what organ tones our mother tongue is capable. 
The restrained and chastened beauty of the 
poetry of Matthew Arnold has taught us in what 
marvelous fashion English can be turned into 
Greek. Instinctively we assume some things be- 
cause Shakespeare has written these assumptions 
into the lives of all English-speaking men. And 
most of our deepest intuitions have been given 
to us directly or indirectly through the majestic 
simphcity of the King James Version of the Eng- 
lish Bible. 



[174] 



AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND 
DEMOCRATIC IDEAJLS 

Some virile and vigorous actions took place in 
America during the latter part of the eighteenth 
century. And it was the clear and masterful 
thinking of seventeenth-century Englishmen 
which lay back of the assertion of the EngHsh 
colonists of the century which followed. You 
can not understand the American republic with- 
out going back to John Locke. That concep- 
tion of orderly democracy which is the political 
ideal of America has been increasingly realized 
in the life of England itself. 

The England whose fight of twenty years at 
last saw the end of the Napoleonic tyranny is a 
country to which America is deeply in debt. 
The England whose whole story in the nine- 
teenth century moved in larger orbits of freedom 
and reform is a land whose inspiration has been 
of incalculable value to the younger land across 
the sea. The England whose navy has been the 
most notable police force of democracy in the 
world has more than once stood between us and 
our foes. There have been days when we did not 
realize the danger from which England was pro- 
tecting us. 

[175] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

It is not easy to speak of the debt which we 
have come to owe England since 1914. It has 
been estimated that if the British dead of the vast 
war which has just closed were to begin at sun- 
rise on some morning to march by a particular 
spot, in military formation twenty abreast, and 
marching from sunrise until sunset each day, the 
end of the tenth day would have come before 
the last of that great shadowy army had gone by. 
If every one of the two million soldiers whom 
America sent to France had been killed or 
wounded or incapacitated for service through 
sickness, and a million more training in Ameri- 
can cantonments had met with similar disability, 
the total would be 48,000 less than the British 
casualty list. And every Englishman who died 
and every Englishman who was wounded or laid 
aside by sickness was fighting our battle as well 
as his own. The solid world-wide strength 
which made victory possible to the Allies was 
contributed by Great Britain. 

ENGLISH RESERVE 

An Englishman does not wear his heart on his 
sleeve. He keeps his simple and noble idealisms 
[176] 



AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND 

locked away from easy and curious gaze. But 
when the hour of demand comes, the sudden glory 
of his idealism flashes forth in unhesitating sac- 
rifice and courage. When you meet him in his 
club he may have cynical words. If you are 
ever admitted to his heart you will find there the 
thing which gives friendship permanent mean- 
ing, and the stuff of whose imperishable dreams 
better days are made. Many men in America 
have seen the England within the heart of Eng- 
land, and they are not ashamed to say that they 
have felt like taking off their sandals because 
they stood on holy ground. 

As we try to find our way through these diffi- 
cult days into the serener time for which we hope, 
we are all looking for guidance. We do not 
want to follow the Bourbon who learns nothing 
and forgets nothing. We dare not enter upon 
that uncharted sea where everything is forgotten 
and only the new is accepted. We want to be 
as conservative as the older good and as radical 
as the newer insight. And as we try to think 
of the fashion in which this may be done we find 
ourselves confronted by the history of English 

political life for the last hundred years. 

[177] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 
THE SECRET OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 

Most Englishmen will find much to criticize 
in the period. But the thing which arrests our 
attention is this : 

In England the new and the old, the radical 
and the conservative, moving through ways of 
intense conflict, have after all learned to live 
together, to supplement each other, and to work 
out an organism of life to which each contributed 
vital elements, in a fashion not to be paralleled 
elsewhere in the world. In a sense this is the 
secret of the British Empire. Some of us are 
learning to believe that it is the secret of the 
future life of the world. At least it is a secret 
which America must learn. And here again 
England is our teacher. 

To be sure, America has a life of her own. 
Sometimes we are a bit self-conscious about it. 
Sometimes we are rather assertive in regard to it. 
There is a lusty vitality in the younger nation 
which finds its own ways of expression. And 
much deeper than this is a conviction that out of 
our own struggle and experience we must carve 
the character of our individual life. One nation 
can give much to another. But each nation 
[178] 



AMERICA'S DEBT TO ENGLAND 

must discover its own soul. Each nation must 
listen to the voice which whispers the secret of its 
own genius. And then forever it must be loyal 
to that voice. As America does this, it is with 
no more sympathetic companionship than that of 
multitudes of Englishmen who love America for 
its promise, and for the individual contribution 
which they believe it is to make to the life of the 
world. 



[179] 



THE PREACHER AS A READER OF GENERAL 

LITERATURE 

THE "Talk-it-Out-Club" was the smallest 
of organizations. It had only five mem- 
bers. They had been friends in college and all 
through the years they had stuck to the habit of 
lunching together once a month and then having 
several hours of talk. Sometimes only four 
members were present at a meeting. Sometimes 
only three. And very rarely there were only 
two. But it was the pride of the club that there 
had been a meeting every month for twenty 
years. "Tom" Sherman was the editor of a big 
city daily. Dick Brewster — ^Dr. Bichard C. 
Brewster — was the pastor of a church which had 
worked itself into the warp and woof of the city's 
life. John Linton was a professor in a theo- 
logical seminary located near the big town, Fred 
Milburn was a writer of popular stories, and Dan 
Martin was a country preacher who had shep- 
herded one flock twenty miles out from the city 
[180] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

for many a year. No papers were ever read at 
the Talk-it-Out-Club. No subjects were ever 
announced. Tom Sherman said he came to find 
out what the subject would be; for without fail, 
sooner or later, some theme would loom up and 
then there would be rare good talk when every 
man gave of his best. 

A wholesome, vigorous red-blooded group of 
men they looked as they sat about the table in a 
private room at the hotel this January Monday. 
There had been the usual exchange of personal 
experiences and of comments about the moving 
pageant of the world. Fred Milburn looked up 
suddenly when there was a lull in the conversa- 
tion. "I saw a preacher the other day," he said. 

There was a quick flash in Dick Brewster's 
eye. "Think of it!" he cried. "Did you cap- 
ture him? What was he like? Describe the 

specimen." 

The popular novelist leaned back thoughtfully. 

"You see," he began, "I was looking up mate- 
rial in a foreign quarter of the town. I found 
material enough, but right in the midst of it I 
found a parson who had his finger on the pulse of 
every person in that part of town. He knew all 
about them. He talked their kind of talk. He 

[181] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

was the big brother of the whole quarter. Why, 
do you know, I learned that not a policeman in 
that district knew what was really going on there 
as well as this preacher! And the political boss 
who thought he kept that section in his pocket 
couldn't touch him for grip on the people. He's 
right in the center of the ring — begging the par- 
don of the clerical gentlemen present. He's a 
preacher you can't describe without going to the 
sporting page for a vocabulary." 

Tom Sherman broke in to remark, "Preachers 
used to be experts in books. Now they are get- 
ting to be experts in life." 

The theological professor turned upon the 
editor scornfully. "Why drag in the fallacy of 
'either — or' when it doesn't cost any more to say 
*both'? Preachers don't have to repudiate their 
libraries in order to get into contact with life. 
The typical preacher of to-day knows a lot about 
people and he has no end of knowledge of books 
too." 

"That was true of my parson in the foreign 
quarter, anyhow," said Fred Milburn. "He 
took me into his study. There were no end of 
well thumbed masterpieces and it took my breath 
for a minute to see the volumes of present-day 
[182] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

essays and poems and fiction. The man had 
everything Alfred Noyes has written. You 
ought to have seen his eyes shine as he talked of 
him. He had three or four volumes of Samuel 
Crothers's essays, with four or five of Arthur 
Benson's. He had Walter Lippmann's three 
hooks. He even had the *Spoon River Anthol- 
ogy' " — this with a chuckle ; *'he had Basil King's 
*The Street Called Straight' and 'The Way 
Home.' And he had every one of David Gray- 
son's hooks. What do you think of that for the 
library of a preacher?" 

A light had come into Dan Martin's eyes at 
the mention of David Grayson. "Of course a 
mere novelist wouldn't be expected to know," he 
cried merrily, "but David Grayson is part of the 
pastoral equipment of a well-made country par- 
son. He reads David Grayson in order to get 
acquainted with his own people." 

Dr. Richard Brewster looked up eagerly. 
"You men of the open country can't have a mon- 
opoly on Grayson," he said. "Only last week I 
was going to deal with a man with my nerves, 
instead of with my head or my heart, and one 
chapter of *The Friendly Road' called me to time 
and gave the key to the situation." 

[183] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

"But I hadn't finished," said Fred Milburn. 
"My preacher in the foreign quarter had every 
book O. Henry wrote on a shelf below a row of 
books by Rudyard Kipling. He had Ralph Con- 
nor's stories, and near the books of Professor 
Steiner, on 'Immigrants Before and After,' 
Mary Antin's 'Promised Land,' Jacob Riis's 
^Making of an American,' Robert Hunter's 
'Poverty,' Donald Lowrie's 'My Life in Prison 
and My Life Out of Prison' " — and here he came 
to a halt quite out of breath. 

The editor lifted a finger in half-solemn, half- 
jesting fashion. "Just remember, gentlemen," 
he said quietly, "that the man who is looking for 
source material regarding contemporary life can- 
not afford to miss O. Henry. He may not tell 
you much about regeneration, but he does give 
you no end of information about the people who 
have got to be regenerated." 

Dick Brewster was ready with the next word. 
"Right you are, Tom," he declared. "The man 
who does things in the world of to-day must know 
the soil where he's going to plant the seed, and 
O. Henry has detailed information about a good 
many kinds of human soil." 

"But what about the seed?" inquired John 
[184] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

Linton. "Did this wonderful man have any 
books which suggested that he might be a 
preacher?" 

Fred Milburn grinned. "Well, to be frank, 
I made a careful investigation and I was mighty 
glad of the books he didn't have. He had no 
predigested theological brain food. There were 
no sermon outlines. There were no books of ser- 
monic illustrations arranged by topics. There 
were no commentaries of the type which do a 
man's homiletical work for him in such a fashion 
that he loses his intellectual integrity. I have 
seen clerical libraries which were a warranted sub- 
stitute for ministerial brains." 

"But what did he have to help him as a 
preacher?" persisted John Linton. 

Fred Milburn thought a moment. "I'll have 
it right away," he said. "I spent a couple 
of hours in the man's library and he was talking 
of his books all the v/hile. Yes, I remember now. 
He pointed to four of the volumes of Yale Lec- 
tures on Preaching — the one by R. W. Dale, the 
one by Phillips Brooks, Peter Forsyth's 'Posi- 
tive Preaching and the Modern Mind,' and Syl- 
vester Home's 'Romance of Preaching' — and 
told me how much they had helped him. It 

[185] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

seemed he had heard Home, in his church in 
London, and the powerful, passionate oratory of 
the man had completely captured him. He said 
a curious thing about Peter Forsyth: 'Forsyth 
grips me because he knows how bad it all is and 
what a big thing has been done about it.' " 

*' *The cruciability of the cross,' " said Dr. 
Richard Brewster quietly. "I think it was Sir 
William Robertson Nicoll who objected to that 
phrase, but it seems to me it goes to the root of 
the matter. I won't undertake to defend the 
etymology, but I'm sure of the theology." 

Dan Martin had been waiting to get in a word. 
"Did this prize parson seem to live in the intel- 
lectual world of to-day?" 

The novelist smiled broadly now. "Not so 
entirely as a certain country parson we all know," 
he replied, "but I thought he did fairly well. 
Hermann's book on Eucken and Bergson was 
on his table, *The Creative Evolution' was on a 
shelf nearby, and beside it was Eucken's 'Main 
Currents of Modern Thought.' Then I noticed a 
little book on American Thought, 'From Puri- 
tanism to Pragmatism,' and another, on 'Person- 
alism and the Problems of Philosophy,' by Ralph 
[186] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

Flewelling. He talked about these things in a 
human sort of way, too. He had heard Eucken 
and Bergson and he had been a pupil, he said, 
of Professor Borden P. Bowne. Well-worn 
copies of Bowne's books were on his shelves. He 
seemed quite keen about philosophy. He said 
he got a good deal of recreation out of philo- 
sophical reading after he had been tackling a 
difficult human being. He seemed to feel that 
books are rather elementary after you have been 
dealing with people." 

"If our kings were only philosophers and our 
philosophers were only kings — " paraphrased 
Dick Brewster; "only in this case it's our parsons 
who are becoming philosophers. What would 
Plato have thought of that?" 

"Inasmuch as he was the greatest preacher of 
classic Greece he could scarcely object to the 
combination," Dan Martin flashed back quickly. 

Still Fred Milburn was not through. "I can't 
remember all the commentaries, though I've 
heard John Linton talk about them enough to 
know they were the right ones. The poets who 
have stolen fire from heaven were there — copies 
which had been used, too. You ought to have 

[187] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

seen the man's Browning. There was history, 
and biography, and there were books on social 
and economic subjects. *I economize on every- 
thing except my books,' the parson said. There 
were books hke Harold Begbie's *Twice Born 
Men' and 'Souls in Action,' dripping with first- 
hand contact with human spirits, and last of all 
there were — " here Fred Milburn paused, and 
concluded dramatically, "there were books on 
athletics: Spaulding's 'America's National 
Game,' a fat volume on * Intercollegiate Foot- 
ball,' and some volumes of the Baseball Maga- 



zine/^ 



Tom Sherman threw up his hands. "I don't 
believe it," he cried. "It's all an Alice-in-Won- 
derland-Grimm's Fairy Tales-Arabian Nights- 
production. You made it up. There isn't any 
such parson." 

In the most unconscious way in the world Dan 
Martin interrupted. "Don't go too fast, Tom," 
he cried. "Why, I have most of those books my- 
self." The theological professor joined in: "I 
plead guilty too; I have every one of them." 

Tom Sherman looked at Dick Brewster. 
"Put the last witness on the stand," he said. 
"Now, you telephone-plagued, nerve-racked met- 
[188] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

ropolitan parson, tell me: do you have all these 
books?" 

"It is even as you say," replied Dick Brewster. 
''And do you read them?" "I cannot deny it." 
"When?" asked Sherman dramatically, with 
flashing eyes. 

Dick Brewster reached a hand into the pocket 
of his sack coat and pulled out a book which filled 
it tightly. It was Alfred Noyes's last volume, 
"The Lord of Misrule." "I always have one or 
two of them in my pocket. I read Masefield's 
'Everlasting Mercy' in a trolley car. Just lis- 
ten to this," he said, turning the pages of Noyes's 
book: 

** 'Salomon sacked the sunsets 
Wherever his black ships rolled. 
He rolled them up like a purple clotH 
And packed them into his hold. 
Salomon packed his heart with dreams. 
And all the dreams were true.' 

"I can make pastoral calls after IVe read 
things like that or this : 

** *You chatter in church like jackdaws 
Words that would wake the dead 
Were there one breath of life in you. 
One drop of blood,* he said. 

[189] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

"You feel fire in your tongue ready to turn itself 
into words the next time you preach after read- 
ing that." 

Tom Sherman was looking at him in wonder. 
"You carry your books and your emotions like 
that all the time?" he asked. 

Dick Brewster laughed. "There's a book I'm 
reading in nearly every room in my house," he 
confessed, "and there are one or two in my 
pockets as well. They are always waiting when- 
ever I have a minute." 

"And when does your mind rest?" pursued the 
editor. 

"That's the secret," cried Dick Brewster mer- 
rily, "and of course you've really learned it long 
ago. Whenever you change the sub j ect of your 
thoughts your mind rests. My books of general 
reading are a recreation. They renew my brain. 
They don't tire it, — of course," he added, "I take 
plenty of exercise. I don't make books an ex- 
cuse for letting my muscles get flabby. All the 
parts of the machine work together." 

Frank admiration was in Tom Sherman's eyes 
as he looked at his finely built, vigorous friend. 
"You'll do," he chuckled; "you'll do even for 
Saint Mark's." 
[190] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

In the meantime Fred Milburn's thought had 
taken another trail suggested by Dick Brew- 
ster's remarks. "So you are reading as a prep- 
aration," he said ; "a preparation for dealing with 
people and a preparation for preaching sermons? 
A good many people I know use reading as an 
escape." 

Dan Martin was in the thick of the conversa- 
tion in an instant. "An escape!" he cried con- 
temptuously. "And, if that is all, think what 
comes of it ! The reaction is worse than the thing 
you tried to escape from. You can't escape life. 
You've got to face it." 

John Linton half protested. "But you 
wouldn't deny, Dan, that a man has the right to 
forget his worries in a good book. After an hour 
of reading sometimes one sees everything in hap- 
pier and more wholesome relations." 

"That's not an escape," said Dan Martin. 
"Or, if it is, it's an escape from your nerves and 
not from life. Of course you can use a book 
just as you sleep, for a rest. But you don't ex- 
pect to sleep forever, and you'll wake up in the 
same world with just the same problems." 

"I know what Dan means," said Dick Brew- 
ster. "There is a woman in my church who 

[191] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

evades every serious responsibility life would 
force upon her, and she keeps from thinking of 
them by filling her mind with the contents of 
fascinating books. I've found her weeping over 
a book one moment, and the next perfectly cold 
and cynical about a human being whom life had 
wounded." 

Tom Sherman looked up with another thought 
flashing in his eye. ''Do preachers ever get 
caught in that trap?" he asked. "Are they ever 
the pastors of the people they have read about in 
books rather than the actual members of their 
congregations ?" 

John Linton was smiling in gay remembrance. 
"Do you know," he said, "I once found that I 
was preaching to a congregation made up of 
Charles Dickens's characters. Then a little later 
every member of my congregation was provided 
by Thackeray." 

"What did you do about it?" asked Tom Sher- 
man. 

"Well, I began to check the people off. I 
found I wasn't all wrong. There were charac- 
ters like those of Dickens there, sure enough, and 
there were some who might have had their por- 
traits painted by Thackeray. Then there was no 
[192] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

end of other wonderful kinds. What I discov- 
ered was that a book must be an introduction to 
the study of people and not a substitute for it." 

Fred Milburn, who had a turn for psychology, 
now asked, "What's all this reading doing to us? 
Do our literary emotions make us less capable of 
real emotions? We have most experiences 
through books before we have them in life. Does 
it help ? Or does it hurt ?" 

Dan Martin was ready with his reply. **It 
may do either one. It all depends on a man's 
attitude toward books and toward people. I had 
a wonderful time when I read Kathleen Norris's 
'Mother.' It seemed to set all the fountains of 
feeling playing. I felt as if I had never under- 
stood my own mother until I read that book. 
Then I had to go to see a woman who had just 
lost a little baby. I had made such calls often, 
but this time it was different. I didn't say much 
to the woman, but I just had to pray before I 
left her. There was a deep sort of light in her 
eyes as I rose to go, as she said, *You do under- 
stand, and it helped.' " 

There was a moment of rather tense quiet. 
Then John Linton said, "I once gave *The Ring 
and The Book' to a sensitive, eager young college 

[193] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

student. He met me the night after he had read 
*Pompiha.' We took a turn out on the quiet 
street together in the moonhght. The boy looked 
at me with one of those wonderful bits of confi- 
dence you get from a lad sometimes. 'I sat up 
until two o'clock reading "Pompilia" last night/ 
he said. Then he hesitated and added, in a low 
firm tone which I have never forgotten, 'There 
are some things I'll never be able to do — now.' " 
Tom Sherman's eyes were burning quietly. It 
was a rare thing for him to speak right out of 
his inner life. He had a dread of wearing his 
heart on his coat sleeve. But now he said, "The 
*Idylls of the King' did that for me. It came 
just at the laght time. Guinevere was the poem 
which performed the last bit of surgery. 

** *We needs must love the highest when we see it. 
Not Launcelot nor another.' 

There's been many a bitter scrap since then, but 
I've always known it was Arthur who set the 
pace." The men had now struck that deeper 
mood when talk seems to burn with the glow of 
life itself. Fred Milburn looked up. "I read 
John JVIasefield's 'Daffodil Fields' last night," he 
said. "Is it as bad as that? Where did the 
[194] 



READER OF GENERAL LITERATURE 

Everlasting Mercy come in with those people?" 

Dick Brewster turned toward him. "I read 
'Daffodil Fields' last week," he said, ''and I think 
it's true, and hfe is as bad as that. But it isn't 
all the truth. And it isn't the most important 
truth that poem tells. In fact I'm sure John 
Masefield didn't tell all there was to tell about 
those people. He told facts, and he portrayed 
feelings correctly, but there were other facts. 
You may be sure the Everlasting Mercy was at 
work right in the 'Daffodil Fields.' " 

"You think there was some deep struggle and 
failure — some opportunity and some rejection — 
which lay back of some of the things Masefield 
tells?" inquired Dan Martin. 

"Just that," said Dick Brewster. 

"If one could only be sure," said Fred Milburn. 

"Sure! You've got to be sure," Dick Brew- 
ster flashed back. "Why, man, you — a novelist 
— a student of life in the raw and the real — don't 
mean to tell me you ever came to grip with a 
man — and found that fate did the thing for him! 
I don't mean events. Anything can happen a 
man. I mean inner attitude. The hght may be 
dull and dim, but there's always hght enough for 
a man to know which way he ought to turn his 

[195] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

face. And he dies with his face turned toward 
it or against it. That's what hfe's about." 

Fred Milburn's face had a strange quiet on it. 
"IVe known men to die in the mire with their 
face turned toward the stars," he said. 

Dan Martin looked at his watch, and with a 
quick gesture rose. "Only time for the four- 
thirty train," he said; and then added, "To-day 
has been just right. We began with books and 
ended with people. That's what the preacher 
has got to do. That's what everybody must do. 
The University of Humanity — that is the great- 
est school of all." 

So the "Talk-it-Out-Club" ended its meeting 
for the day. 



[196] 



XI 
FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 



H 



E is not here; for He is risen." Matthew 
XXVIII. 6. 
Just at the moment I am not especially in- 
terested in questions of history. Just at the mo- 
ment I am not particularly interested in ques- 
tions of criticism. Just at the moment I am very 
much interested in a question of psychology. 
The ancient narrative from which I have read 
tells of two women who went forth sadly to find 
the grave of a dead enthusiasm. And instead of 
a dead enthusiasm they found a living passion. 
At once the story strikes a note of reality. We 
all know what it is to walk through the days in 
the midst of the disillusionment which comes to 
those whose enthusiasms have lost power to hold 
them. We all have some apprehension of what 
it would mean if we could find some vital and 
growing passion which would develop as we de- 
velop, and which would have a permanent power 
to master and inspire us. 

[197] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

So many men have to live on after their interest 
in life has died. So many women must go 
through the motions of life's activities after the 
freshness and the glow and the hearty responsive 
energy have long departed. Youth is full of 
gay and generous enthusiasms. It is rimmed 
with the gold of lofty and commanding purposes. 
But the hard erosion of the days keeps doing its 
deadly work. One by one the buoyant enthusi- 
asms depart. One by one the 

WHITE PEAKS ON THE MOUNTAINS 

of our desire fade behind the mists. At last we 
find that we are living in a dull and unkindled 
world. We are the keepers of a place of graves, 
and under the green mounds lie our fairest 
dreams and our most cherished hopes. There is 
only the taste of a bitter disillusionment left for 
us. The question becomes more and more poig- 
nant. Is there any gripping potent passion 
which will stand the wear and tear of life? Is 
there any high and commanding enthusiasm 
which will cut its way through this world with 
imperial power and keep its brightness in spite 
of the disillusioning years ? Can a man be honest 
[198] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

and clear-eyed and yet keep the fair and beautiful 
glow of the morning? 

The whole situation is made more acute by the 
time in which we live. Such a problem is pres- 
ent in any age of thoughtful and candid facing 
of the facts. It makes itself felt in any period 
of clear-eyed and penetrating introspection. 
But we live in the time which is following a vast 
and terrible war. And the period after a world 
war is always a period of reaction in the emotional 
life of mankind, and to many people a period of 
bitter disillusionment. The war produced a 
wonderful and world-wide enthusiasm. Britain 
found its deeper life in a way that suggests the 
splendor of an apocalyptic vision. France flung 
forth the flag of a dauntless and desperate and 
inspired courage at which the whole world won- 
dered. America was fairly stunned at the inner 
resources of moral and spiritual passion which 
released themselves when at last, all doubts and 
hesitations banished, the die was cast and the 
New World entered the fight at the side of the 
Old. Life was full of tragedy. The war was 
an unspeakable and far-flung brutality. But in 
spite of all that, the world had a new birth of the 
spirit. It looked forth with cleansed and ripened 

[199] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

eyes, and so looking forth, it found an hour of 
moral and spiritual vision which lifted life to new 
ranges of meaning. Poetry, with its capacity 
to tell us the evasive and subtle secrets of the 
heart, revealed in singing words the rapture of a 
new faith, the glory of a new discovery of the 
meaning of the life of individual men, of indi- 
vidual nations and of the whole world. There 
was a world-wide agony. There was also a 
world-wide glory. There was a world-wide 
sacrifice. There was also the wonder of a world- 
wide immortal hope. Some deep proud power 
of nobility emerged. And once and again life 
stood before us transfigured in the very days of 
death. 

Then peace came. It came with 

THE FLUTTER OF WINGS OF HOPE. 

It came like the burst of dawn after a dark night. 
It came with a breath of hope from the moun- 
tains of the world. And after that there came 
an hour of testing which in its own way is as hard 
as — perhaps even harder than — the time of war. 
With the coming of the day after the night of 
war suddenly many things which we had sup- 
[200] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

posed to be gold began to reveal their true qual- 
ity. It was like going to one of those places 
where the glitter of many lights had covered 
everything with glamor in the night hours, only 
to return at dawn to see the poor and shabby 
reality which seemed to have such fairy beauty 
during the night. The remorseless light of day 
brought before us all sorts of unlovely things. 
Old prejudices still unmastered, old passions still 
controlling cruelly selfish men, all the old tale of 
the slimy path of the serpent across our radiant 
idealisms forced itself upon our attention once 
more. Then there was the sheer physical re- 
action after the strain of all the years of war. A 
certain amount of our present thinking repre- 
sents the rebellion of nerves held taut for too 
long a time. There is the world-wide ethical 
weariness after the years of intense and heroic 
decision. In other days a peace congress has 
sometimes brought the repudiation of the very 
ideals which give meaning to the war. We know 
how diplomacy may lose the soul of the thing for 
which the soldiers fought. And in all the tug 
and strain of conflicting interests the subtle 
temptation comes to feel that our deepest ideal- 
isms and our most noble enthusiasms will be lost 

[201] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

from view. In the midst of the cool shock of 
disillusiomnent which always comes after a great 
war, and which is sometimes accentuated by the 
cynical selfishness which is released in that period, 
the question lifts itself with almost tragic ur- 
gency. Is there a passion of noble purpose and 
lofty and sustained and confident idealism which 
can go through all the experiences of these test- 
ing days with its colors flying, its eyes glowing, 
and from the very hour of deadly reaction ex- 
tract a victorious and productive enthusiasm? 
Can we find a permanent passion which is steady 
and strong despite the worst that life can do to it? 
We need to remember that men have faced 
this problem before, and that they have met it 
triumphantly. When Alaric broke into Rome 
in 410 A. D. it seemed as if the very knell of life 
itself had been sounded. Home was the pro- 
tector of all the slowly won gains of civilization. 
Rome was the source of the strength which was 
the hope of the world. And Rome has been rav- 
ished by barbarian fighters who had no sense of 
the value of the thing which had come within their 
power. A tremor went over the world. A great 
despair sent its shadow over many a land. In 
[202] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

just this time there lived in North Africa a man 
with a powerful mind, a deeply glowing heart, 
and a certain commanding intellectual and 
spiritual faith. As the city of man reeled and 
tottered Augustine wrote that great book, "The 
City of God." In the midst of the changing he 
found the changeless. In the midst of the 
mutable he found the permanent. In the midst 
of despair he found hope. He found a perma- 
nent and satisfying passion when all the enthusi- 
asms of the ancient world were dying at his feet. 
The tremendous thing about Christianity is 
just its possession of 

THE SECRET OF DEATHLESS PASSION. 

In the midst of decaying hopes and disintegrat- 
ing idealisms Christianity possesses the power of 
perpetual youth. It rises Phoenix-like from its 
own funeral pyre to remake the world. It al- 
ways stands at the place of death with the ring- 
ing words: "He is not here; He is risen." 

By Christianity we mean something deeper 
than the organized and visible Church. The 
Church has never been v/ithout this deeper thing. 

[203] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

This it is which has made the Church its own 
severest critic. This it is which has produced 
such shaking and transforming revolutions from 
within. But the invisible reality of the Chris- 
tian religion is not one with even the noblest 
ecclesiastical organization, though it uses every 
true thing in the life of the Church as a means 
by which it may work in the world. Christianity 
is itself an invisible force which molds into the 
form and quality of a new life and power men 
and women who surrender to its power. Some- 
times it does this within the Church. Sometimes 
it does it without the Church. Sometimes it does 
this in the terms of a great and adequate theo- 
logical interpretation of the meaning of it all. 
Sometimes the work is done in lives completely 
innocent of the intellectual relationships of their 
experience, or even hostile to the very truths 
which they will one day understand are back of 
their own mastering experience of reality. But 
the work gets itself done. It renews lives. It 
creates purposes. It puts the potency of a per- 
manent passion into unkindled hearts. 

If one is asked for a description of the way in 
which all this happens, if one is asked for a 
formula by which it can be explained, if one is 
[204] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

asked for a method of constructing the philos- 
opher's stone which will turn all things to gold, 
one must frankly admit that these things tran- 
scend our powers. We cannot explain the law of 
gravitation. We can use it. We cannot teU the 
secret of chemical reactions. We can deal with 
them in many a practical and useful fashion. 
And in the deep and free world of personal re- 
lationships it is even more true that we must be 
content with the actualities of experience, and not 
insist upon reducing them to mathematics. The 
tremendous fact is just that lives in vital contact 
with the transforming personality of Jesus 
Christ do find dead enthusiasms changed into liv- 
ing passions. They are saved from the tragedy 
of having to outlive all their ideals. They are 
rescued from cynicism and misanthropy and de- 
spair. They do find the secret of the eye which 
keeps its flash of glad energy through the years. 
They do have a fire burning in their lives, which 
warms but does not destroy, which shines but 
does not reduce them to dust and ashes. They 
become living examples of the bush which is 
burning but is not consumed. 

We must frankly face the fact that there is no 
substitute for the convincing 

[205] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 
POWER OF A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 

It is when these things have authenticated them- 
selves in our own deepest hves that we come to a 
knowledge which is more deep and mastering than 
any which can be produced by the methods of 
reasoning, and one which gains nothing from all 
the deft processes of formal logic. Life is a 
vast laboratory, and it is those who make the 
great adventure for themselves who come to have 
definite and satisfying knowledge. In America 
there is a freemasonry of boyhood in the summer 
time which signals with two uplifted fingers from 
the swimming pool. The uplifted fingers mean, 
"Come on in; the water's fine." The boy who 
sees the signal must try for himself if he really 
wants to know. There are a good many things 
which you can do for other people. There are 
some things which you cannot do for them. One 
boy cannot go swimming for another boy. One 
man eannot taste the deep and mastering per- 
sonal experiences for another man. In respect 
of life's greatest experiences we can only encour- 
age our friends to make the fine adventure. 
They must do the deciding. They must make 
the leap. 
[206] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

To be sure, the situation is somewhat compli- 
cated by the people who have made the motions 
of the great adventure without really taking its 
greater risks or participating in its full meaning. 
From every war some men come home who 
seemed to be a part of it, who made a number of 
the motions of being a part of it, but who, as 
their comrades well knew, never entered into its 
real spirit, and always flinched if they dared when 
it came to its supreme adventures. There are 
men not a few who wear the uniform of religion 
who have never shared in the really great adven- 
tures of the army of the Lord. From them we 
will learn nothing of the secrets of a powerful 
and sustaining passion. From them we will 
learn nothing of those marvelous and vitalizing 
experiences which transform the whole meaning 
of life. But, after all, Christianity is not to be 
judged by any number of frayed and worn, 
make-believe Christians. It can only be judged 
by the men and women of that gloriously respon- 
sive spirit which takes all the risks and goes forth 
on the great adventure, and receives all that 
Christianity can do for a human life. You can 
never judge a science by a young man who re- 
fuses to study and attends the classes with his 

[207] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

body while his thoughts stray over all the world. 
You judge a science by what it means to a man 
who gives his whole life to it. In the same way 
you can only judge Christianity by the men and 
women who open their lives to its every ministry. 
The world is rich indeed in evidence when we 
come to approach the matter in this fashion. 
And few of us are so poor in great human con- 
tacts that we do not have personal memories of 
some life which in its own way gives us a touch 
of that 



SPIRITUAL HOMESICKNESS 

and wistful longing which St. Francis of Assisi 
has given to all the world. The challenge of the 
life organized into fullness and richness and 
power by the compelling potencies of the one im- 
perial and transforming personality is not far 
from any one of us. The whole matter comes at 
last to one unescapable necessity. We reach the 
place where description does not satisfy us. We 
reach the place where eager words of tribute to 
the great Master begin to lose their gripping 
power. Then, if we would go farther, we must 
ourselves enter the laboratory. We must our- 
[208] 



FINDING A PERMANENT PASSION 

selves take the decisive step. We must go forth 
on the great adventure. We must take the way 
of action and make it the way of discovery. For 
as a wise nineteenth-century thinker has said: 
"It is the hour of illuminated activity which is 
the hour of definite knowledge." 

We do not have to begin with an orthodox 
mind. We do have to 



BEGIK WITH AN ORTHODOX WILL. 

And an orthodox will is a will set about the pur- 
poses which were Christ's purposes in the world. 
In the long run the mind follows the will. And 
the treasures of knowledge as well as the treasures 
of character will open at last to the man who 
takes all the risks of going forth to do the will of 
Christ in the world. The whole-hearted commit- 
ment to the Christian ideal of conduct and of lov- 
ing service will release all sorts of unsuspected 
things in a man's life. At last the eager obedi- 
ence will become the profound companionship. 
The glowing devotion will deepen into a sense of 
ethical dependence which at last has all the sharp 
and poignant quality of a knowledge of salva- 
tion. The whole life will be kindled into pas- 

[209] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

sionate and intense and decisive commitment to 
the God who speaks to us in the words of Jesus 
Christ. There will be a perpetual growth of the 
passion as will and mind and heart join together 
in the loyalty of the advancing life. There may 
be disillusionment all round. The fire within but 
glows more brightly. There may be a tragic 
consciousness of personal failure. The high 
summons of the Master and His outstretched 
hands of help will but have the more potent al- 
lurement. And as the power which He released 
becomes more dominant, the life will find ever- 
growing secrets of inspiration. You can out- 
grow yourself. You cannot outgrow Christi- 
anity. You can outgrow your environment. 
You cannot outgrow the stature of the Master 
who brings you life's supremest gift of glowing 
enthusiasm. In this most deep and commanding 
sense Christianity is always the religion of the 
empty tomb. Whenever something dies in a 
Christian it is always the prelude to a resurrected 
life. Death never has the last word. Life per- 
manent and passionate is triumphant. 



[210] 



XII 

THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW 

ERA 

"And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down 
out of heaven from God." — Revelation XXI. 2. 

THE vision of the reign of triumphant re- 
ligion has been an inspiration and a hope 
to men of deep spiritual passion in all ages. It 
has received classic and commanding expression 
in the vivid picture with which the twenty-first 
chapter of the book of Revelation opens. The 
New Jerusalem is to come down from Heaven 
to take possession of the world. It is a daring 
enough conception, as if Plato had suggested 
that one of his "ideas" was to cease being an in- 
visible reality and to enter the actual world so 
that this world would not merely participate in 
reality, but would become reality itself. The 
ideal is to become the real. But in the book of 
Revelation the whole conception is sharpened by 
a nobly personal view of the universe. The 
reign of religion is to be the reign of God in the 

[211] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

actual life of the world. How men have dreamed 
of it! How men have hoped for it! And how 
they have gone forth to live unselfishly, to serve 
with loving devotion, and to give the very rich- 
ness of life itself in the name of it! 

There have been many new eras since the Man 
of Galilee spoke words which were stars shining 
in a black sky and lived a life which brought a 
new sunrise over the Eastern hills, and turned 
death into an achievement, and the tomb into a 
place of hope. The fourth century saw a new era 
as Constantine bent the wings of the Imperial 
eagle to the mastery of the Cross. The thirteenth 
century saw a new era when the piety of Saint 
Francis and the penetrating thought of Saint 
Thomas Aquinas and the far-flung power of In- 
nocent III seemed to indicate that the ChurcK 
had at last mastered the emotions and the thought 
and the activity of the world. The sixteenth cen- 
tury saw a new era when the evangelical experi- 
ence of Luther which gave the Reformation a 
heart, and the powerful thinking of Calvin which 
gave the Reformation a mind, turned the world 
of the Renaissance into the paths of religion. 
The nineteenth century saw a new era when the 
generalizations of science and the multiplied ma- 
[212] 



PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

chines which were the product of invention 
changed the mental and physical world in which 
men lived. Each of these eras was in some sense 
dominated by religion, except the last. And that 
period of triumphant science and triumphant in- 
vention which came to such fullness of power in 
the nineteenth century marks the acute crisis of 
a movement where many men felt that religion 
had lost the knowledge of the powerful pass- 
words which are recognized in actual life. But 
the deepest religious sanctions held their own in 
some of the most powerful of the minds molded 
by the scientific movement, and religion set about 
its practical program with a new zestful will. 

We are now at the entrance of another new 
era. The war has changed many things. The 
war has destroyed many things. Just how 
much has been destroyed and just how much re- 
mains it is not easy to say. We are entering 
upon the new era with much intellectual con- 
fusion, with many moral hesitations, with much 
social disintegration, and with a quality of life 
where rapid and bewildering movement is a good 
deal more evident than the direction which the 
movement is finally to take. With this back- 
ground we have read the vision of triumphant 

[213] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

religion which is to be found in the twenty-first 
chapter of the bool^: of Revelation. How much 
significance does this kindling hope have for the 
world in which we live? To what degree does 
religion possess the power to command the al- 
legiance of the men of our time? What will be 
the place of religion in this particular new era? 

I. In a recent and very significant article, Dr. 
Archibald Fleming has spoken of those who have 
come to feel "that not even God is so inscrutable 
a problem as the hmnan heart itself." 

Men are truly just on the edge of a new dis- 
covery of the strangeness of their own lives. 
They are beginning to stand bewildered before 
the heights and the depths in their own souls and 
the strange vistas which open out from their own 
minds. The war has startled all of us into a feel- 
ing that we did not know humanity. It has 
startled some of us into a feeling that we did not 
know ourselves. The eyes of many men are 
turning within. They are beginning to take 
once more that long and bewildering journey 
into the interior of their own lives. And they 
are astonished beyond measure at what they find. 
The easy clarity of many theories falls helpless 
before the confusing complexity of the facts. 
[214] 



PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

With an awful sense of surprise, many a man 
confronts his own soul. Now it is clear that here 
is a fundamental and critical opportunity for re- 
ligion to speak. It must interpret men to them- 
selves. It must move through the cumulative 
strangeness of the individual spirit and express 
its meaning, its tragedy, and its hope. As men 
sway and totter before the unresting sea of their 
own individual lives, the imperial word of mas- 
tery must be spoken. And only religion can 
speak it. To take the Man of Galilee with us on 
the strange journey when we explore ourselves 
is to be guided to a new sense of meaning and of 
purpose. To take the Lord Christ with us 
as we dare to face ourselves is to have a new con- 
sciousness of struggle and victory. 

In the moment when we know ourselves most 
deeply and honestly we will suddenly know Him 
as we never knew Him before. And in the mo- 
ment when we see Him with new and apprehend- 
ing eyes, we will know ourselves for the first time 
after all our adventures in self-knowledge. In- 
dividual Christian certainty comes to a maa 
when he gets his first vision of his own soul as he 
looks straight into the depths of the eyes of 
Christ. 

[215] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

II. "I used to believe in society,'* said a heavy- 
eyed and disillusioned man, "but now I have 
learned that individual men are like Leibnitz* 
monads. They seem to have relations with each 
other. Really, there are no relations at all. 
And in this case there is no preestablished har- 
mony. There is no harmony of any kind. Each 
life is forever shut away in the awful isolation of 
its own being. There is no such thing as society. 

"With all our mechanical and mathematical 
articulations, and with all our seeming achieve- 
ment of solidarity, many men are studying the 
vast wastes which the war has left behind and are 
tempted to repudiate the belief that men are ca- 
pable of a great and growing and noble life to- 
gether. They see primitive instincts emerging 
with amazing power. They see altruistic motives 
failing of practical seizure. And they fall into 
dark and devious ways of doubt. Here, again, 
religion has a most potent opportunity. If it can 
interpret men to each other, if it can make society 
a noble and commanding ideal in the minds of 
men, it will render the most essential service to 
the men and women who are now alive in the 
world. And the splendid fact remains that, what- 
ever our contemporary confusions, Christianity 
[216] 



PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

has been the most potent power the world has 
known for creating brothers. It has done this 
work in the most varied ages, and among the 
most widely different types of people. And it 
is doing just this thing to-day among multi- 
tudes of men and women who are listening to 
its voice. The tremendous pragmatic appeal 
of this capacity to create brothers, of this power 
to make actual unselfish social relations, is 
a Christian fact as genuine and as stubbornly 
existent as any ugly and remorseless fact of 
contemporary life. And the men and women 
who have personal daring enough, and high ad- 
venturous courage enough, to go forth in the 
name of this commanding ideal make a wonder- 
ful discovery. The hour of action is the hour of 
certainty. The hour of academic debate is the 
hour of hesitation. But when once you have taken 
the whole risk of giving yourself entirely to the 
social ideals of Jesus, there is a flash of illumina- 
tion from the very center of things, and you know 
that brotherhood is more real than selfishness, 
and that the universe is on the side at last of a 
society built about unselfish love. In a new and 
high and authentic sense you find social justifica- 
tion by faith. 

[217] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

III. A little while ago a flaming-eyed idealist 
who had not bent his ideals to the severe discipline 
of close and discriminating thought, burned the 
flags of all the particular nations in a sort of 
symbolic act, at the close of which he unfolded 
the international flag. It was a good deal as if 
a man should begin killing particular men in 
order to find humanity. On the same principle, 
a man might begin being disloyal to particular 
friends in order to find the full meaning of 
friendship in general. 

The truth is that the great loyalties include 
all the genuine and noble small loyalties, and 
do not contradict them. A man does not have 
to be false to his town in order to be loyal to the 
world. Whatever is bad for the world is in the 
long run bad for every particular nation. But 
the very confusion in thinking of these things 
shows the need of some noble and adequate inter- 
pretation of nationality and of international re- 
lations. And here again, religion has an oppor- 
tunity of superb range and power. It is not too 
much to say that Christianity offers us the only 
set of principles which can carry us safely 
through the difiiculties of national and interna- 
tional relationships. The Christian nation real- 
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PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

izes its debt to the world as well as its privileges 
in the world. It sees itself in the light of its op- 
portunity f 01 a world-wide service, and it sees the 
world not as a treasure to be exploited, but a race 
of men to be advanced. All the priceless things 
of national life have their final justification in 
enriching the whole life of man. But they must 
be preserved in high loyalty if the life of man is 
ever to be enriched. You do not feed anybody 
by destroying bread. Now, this combined cau- 
tion and daring, this caution which conserves and 
this daring which gives, belong to the very nature 
of the Christian religion. Even the Gospel did 
not destroy the law. It fulfilled the law. The 
gospel of international brotherhood is to fulfill 
the law of the nations. 

IV. A distinguished English poet once wrote 
some powerful lines on "The Funeral of God." 
They came out of the dark intellectual entangle- 
ment of the period in which they were written, 
but even they were not without their vague, dim 
hope that the burial of God might not be the end 
of the story. As a matter of fact, the observance 
of the obsequies of the Deity has never been en- 
tirely successful. We may have ever so stately 
a ceremonial. But at the last we discover that 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

we had everything necessary for a successful fu- 
neral except the presence of the deceased. We 
can easily arrange for funeral orations. But, as 
a matter of fact, we cannot provide for the dead 
god. 

At the same time, it must be very frankly said 
that false and inadequate and misleading con- 
ceptions of God are dying all the while. And 
so the task of interpreting God in worthy and 
vital fashion comes fresh with the life of each 
new age. And religion does all the other won- 
derful things which are a part of its work, be- 
cause it is fundamentally an interpretation of 
God in the terms of living experience. The new 
era will not have a new God, but it will undoubt- 
edly have a new interpretation of God. This in- 
terpretation will lose nothing that is priceless 
or real out of that growing historic appreciation 
of the meaning of God for the life of man. God 
will still be righteousness alive, as the Hebrew 
prophets saw. God will still be love alive, as 
Jesus revealed Him. God will still be a con- 
science in action as He was made known on Cal- 
vary. He will also be in a new and intimate 
sense the sharer with men of their adventure in 
life. He will be in a more friendly and under- 
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PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

standing fashion the comrade God, who meets 
with them all their experience. He will be the 
source of the uniformities of Nature and of law, 
and the creative center of all the free richness 
of the personal Hfe. And so up from the fresh 
human struggle of the new age will rise a rich 
and authentic experience of the presence of God. 
The new age will not be godless. It will appre- 
hend God with all the wonder of a new and mas- 
tering insight. 

V. A brilliant student in a famous university 
attended the Sunday morning preaching service 
of the institution one day before the beginning 
of the Great War. It was the custom of this in- 
stitution to bring men from over a wide area to 
speak to its students. 

On this particular morning the distinguished 
minister took as his theme: The life after death. 
That afternoon the scornful student wrote home 
to his father : "Think of the imperti^ence of com- 
ing to this university with a sermon on immor- 
tality." It seems a long time since a clever youth 
could be so flippant about this high theme. It is 
a long time since such a thing was possible. It 
is a long time, measured by deep and torturing 
and heart-searching experiences, if not by years. 

[221] 



LIFE AND HISTORY 

We have traveled far, and now a wistful eager- 
ness is in our eyes as we try to follow beyond the 
veil the splendid boys who flung their lives away 
with such audacious gallantry at the call of the 
world's need. And so it comes to pass that one 
of the most immediate opportunities of religion 
in the new era is just the opportunity of inter- 
preting immortality. At bottom, of course, it is 
not an intellectual question at all. It is an 
ethical question. It is a question of producing a 
type of personal character whose extinction is 
unthinkable. You can not with any ethical va- 
lidity connect the thought of the character of 
Jesus with personal disintegration. It is His 
character which makes it possible to believe in 
His resurrection. And the amazing power of 
Christianity lies just in its continual creation of 
a type of character which has its citizenship in 
eternity. It is as men experience the potency 
of the new life in Christ triumphantly energizing 
and renewing their own lives, that immortality 
becomes real and valid and compelling in their 
thought, and basal in their experience. They 
begin to know eternity here, and the life which 
they possess now is in its inmost meaning eternal. 
The personal risk, the adventure, the struggle, 
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PLACE OF RELIGION IN THE NEW ERA 

the victory of the man in whose own experience 
the powers of the Christian religion are made real, 
all lead to the place of quiet assurance about the 
life to come. Thinness of moral and spiritual 
experience fill a man's mind and heart with hesi- 
tations. Fullness of experience of the Chris- 
tian actualities means fullness of confidence in 
the presence of that vast future which lies before. 
A new adventure in vital experience on the part 
of the new era will come forth in a new definite- 
ness in relation to the luminous creative hope of 
immortality. 

The new era, then, is not to be irreligious. To 
be sure, it will not make the mistake of trying 
to live by repeating words, connected with old 
vitalities in which it does not share. It must 
make the noble adventures for itself. It must 
enter the holy of holies by the way of its own 
struggles. It must have its own contacts with 
the high and mastering sanctions of the divine. 
But it will not stifle the deep human cries. It 
will come to know from the deep, searching hon- 
esty of its own life that religion must still inter- 
pret men to themselves, it must interpret men to 
each other, it must interpret society, and give a 
basis for the noblest national and international 

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LIFE AND HISTORY 

life, it must interpret God so that He shall cease 
to be the refuge of formal logic and become the 
mightiest fact of experience, and it must inter- 
pret immortality as it gives to men a life so rich 
and full and potential that only eternity can real- 
ize the unfolding of its possibilities. And in all 
this the Holy City of the Christian ideal will in- 
deed be coming down from heaven. In all this 
the imperial Christ will still be giving men life 
in ampler and ampler fashion. Religion will 
reign anew in lives of men. 



THE END 



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NGRESS 




